Angelina Jolie Was Right About Computers

risc-vchip-architectureopen-source-hardwarearmintel

Abstraction: History and geopolitical rise of RISC-V open instruction set architecture

Key points:

David Patterson invented RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) at UC Berkeley in 1980; RISC chips proved 3-4x faster than CISC equivalents and ARM's RISC architecture now powers every smartphone
RISC-V, created in 2011 by Andrew Waterman, Krste Asanovic, and Yunsup Lee at Berkeley, is a free, open ISA anyone can use without licensing fees; Patterson's 2014 paper "The Case for Open Instruction Sets" launched a second architecture war with ARM
Billions of RISC-V units now ship annually; Meta, Google, Nvidia, and NASA are integrating it; the first RISC-V laptop mainboard (Framework) arrived in 2025
RISC-V enables chip sovereignty: China, India, Brazil and others are using it to develop domestic silicon independent of US-controlled ISAs
SiFive, founded by the Berkeley RISC-V team in 2015, competes directly with ARM commercially
Specialized AI accelerator chips are a major projected application for RISC-V going forward

Connections: Risc V · Arm · Intel · David Patterson · Sifive · Chip Architecture · Instruction Set Architecture · Open Source Hardware