Skip to Content
Computing

A chip design that changes everything: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023

Computer chip designs are expensive and hard to license. That’s all about to change thanks to the popular open standard known as RISC-V.

January 9, 2023
""
Nick Little

WHO

RISC-V International, Intel, SiFive, SemiFive, China RISC-V Industry Alliance

WHEN

Now

Ever wonder how your smartphone connects to your Bluetooth speaker, given they were made by different companies? Well, Bluetooth is an open standard, meaning its design specifications, such as the required frequency and its data encoding protocols, are publicly available. Software and hardware based on open standards—Ethernet, Wi-Fi, PDF—have become household names. 

Now an open standard known as RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) could change how companies create computer chips. 

Chip companies such as Intel and Arm have long kept their blueprints proprietary. Customers would buy off-the-shelf chips, which may have had capabilities irrelevant to their product, or pay more for a custom design. Since RISC-V is an open standard, anyone can use it to design a chip, free of charge. 

RISC-V specifies design norms for a computer chip’s instruction set. The instruction set describes the basic operations that a chip can do to change the values its transistors represent—for example, how to add two numbers. RISC-V’s simplest design has just 47 instructions. But RISC-V also offers other design norms for companies seeking chips with more complex capabilities. 

About 3,100 members worldwide, including companies and academic institutions, are now collaborating via the nonprofit RISC-V International to establish and develop these norms. In February 2022, Intel announced a $1 billion fund that will, in part, support companies building RISC-V chips.

RISC-V chips have already begun to pop up in earbuds, hard drives, and AI processors, with 10 billion cores already shipped. Companies are also working on RISC-V designs for data centers and spacecraft. In a few years, RISC-V proponents predict, the chips will be everywhere. 

Read about how RISC-V is rewriting the economics of chip design and shaking up the tech sector’s power dynamics.

Deep Dive

Computing

Learning to code isn’t enough

Historically, learn-to-code efforts have provided opportunities for the few, but new efforts are aiming to be inclusive.

IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer

The company wants to make large-scale quantum computers a reality within just 10 years.

Multi-die systems define the future of semiconductors

Multi-die system or chiplet-based technology is a big bet on high-performance chip design—and a complex challenge.

The inside story of New York City’s 34-year-old social network, ECHO

Stacy Horn set out to create something new and very New York. She didn’t expect it to last so long.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.