Before the emergence of RISC-V, X86 and ARM had always dominated the CPU architecture field. The two were born in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. The x86 instruction set was launched by Intel in the United States in 1978, and ARM was launched by the British company. ARM was launched in 1985. Since its development, ARM has occupied 90% of the market share of reduced instruction set (RISC), and X86 has occupied 90% of the market share of complex instruction set (CISC).
In 2010, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley, started a new project, which required the selection of a processor instruction set. After analyzing ARM, MIPS, X86 and other instruction sets, it was found that they were not only complex in design, but also had intellectual property issues. So the research team took 3 months to design a new set of instructions, named RISC-V, and completely open the instruction set, using the BSD License open source protocol.
In 2015, RISC-V pioneers Krste Asanovic, Yunsup Lee and Andrew Waterman founded SiFive. As the world's first RISC-V-based customized semiconductor company, one-third of the company's employees are members of the RISC-V R&D team. It can be said that it is a company that inherits the "blood" of RISC-V.
In 2021, Intel considered using $2 billion to acquire SiFive, which had a market value of about $500 million at the time, but the deal failed. It is not difficult to see Intel's concerns that the development of RISC-V may affect its own market at a premium of 4 times. Instead of accepting mergers and acquisitions, it shows that SiFive is optimistic about the future prospects of RISC-V.
