You must log in or register to comment.
A CPU instruction set that is governed by the RISC V International organization, a nonprofit organization which also holds all the RISC V related trademarks.
It has nothing to do with open source really, it is a open standard that anyone can create compatible products for and those products can also be sold commercially.
Really the difference is that the organization verifying your that your CPU correctly follows the instruction set so you can sell it as such, has no profit motive, unlike ARM or Intel/AMD who either outright block any meaningful competition in the case of x86 or want a nice share of the money your gonna make in the case of ARM. Not to mention that ARM and Intel/AMD sell their own CPUs, so there is a big conflict of intressts going on.
It has nothing to do with open source really
Only if you think that open hardware and open software are totally unrelated things, but most open hardware people and open software people think that they are related things.
Yes, but open-specifications doesn’t mean open-hardware.
Open specifications may not be sufficient for open hardware, but they are largely necessary. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_conditions
OpenHW Group: CORE-V Family of Open-Source RISC-V Cores
The point is rather that RISC-V is only open-specifications and most available chip designs are not open-source or only partially so in the open-hardware sense.
No one would claim that the Ethernet specifications are open-hardware, yet you see the same (false) claim for RISC-V all the time.
That’s fine, but I’m not making that claim. RISC-V is free of patent & licensing encumbrances as well as copyright ones, which allows for the possibility of open hardware developing on it. Open source software is likewise about patents and other encumbrances, not only copyright.
