The History of RISC‑V

A Modern, Modular, and Open Approach

RISC-V's simple and modular design offers significant advantages over traditional architectures:

• Efficiency: The streamlined instruction set architecture (ISA) allows for smaller, faster, and more power-efficient implementations
• Open Standard: Like Ethernet and Wi-Fi, RISC-V is an open standard, fostering collaboration and preventing vendor lock-in. This promotes a diverse and competitive ecosystem, benefiting everyone.
• Customization: RISC-V empowers innovation by allowing custom instructions tailored to specific needs. This opens doors for optimizing performance, security, and power efficiency in ways never before possible.
• Common Software: For designers creating software that must run across a range of systems, RISC-V provides flexibility and standard “profiles”, a set of instructions that software can rely on to be present, saving time and money.

RISC-V: Powering Innovation Across Industries

Billions of deployed devices already utilize RISC-V, and it is becoming the de-facto ISA for embedded systems. But this is just the beginning. RISC-V is rapidly expanding into new markets, including:

• Automotive: Powering the next generation of intelligent and autonomous vehicles.
• Consumer devices: Enabling smarter and more efficient televisions, smartphones, wearables, and other electronics.
• Data centers: Driving innovation in cloud computing and server technology.
• Storage: Fast reliable compute for all types of storage
• Networking: Improving the performance and security of network infrastructure.
• Space exploration: Providing reliable and adaptable computing power for space missions.

SiFive: Leading the RISC-V Revolution

Founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive is at the forefront of this architectural revolution.

From idea to global ecosystem in record time:

• 2011 - RISC-V invented in Berkeley
• 2015 - SiFive Founded by RISC-V pioneers and RISC-V International founded to guide global open standard ecosystem
• 2016 - First commercial RISC-V SoC and first RISC-V board, the HiFive1
• 2022- SiFive achieves $2.5B “double unicorn” valuation
• 2025 - >2 Billion SiFive based devices and 400 design wins

Learn more about how SiFive is shaping the future of computing with RISC-V.