You’ve probably never heard of the RISC-V architecture until now. But this technology, which is planned to rival ARM, is an exciting hardware development promoted by the Chinese government to reduce reliance on CPUs and GPUs from western tech companies. From the outside, end users do not notice anything, but with the use of RISC-V technology, the global smartphone market is a candidate to experience a big change in 2022, especially with the transition of Chinese brands to this new technology.
Chinese company Sipeed is leading the development of RISC-V technology. Currently, Alibaba/T-Head announced that they are already implementing this technology in XuanTie C910. The platform works with Android 10, but it will certainly work with Android 12 as well.
RISC-V currently uses a dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with Vivante 3D GPU and 4GB LPDDR4. This means that it will likely target the entry-level segment of the market. Still, Sipeed has announced that an RV64 phone is coming next year. This is an important development in terms of competition.
Tuxphones says RISC-V phones will be more powerful than quad-core A73 processors. This puts them directly in competition with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 663 or 662 processors released in 2020.
Actually, RISC-V has a history. A company called Ainovo released a RISC-V Android tablet called Ainol Novo 7 10 years ago; it was reviewed on ITProPortal at the time and the prototype was promising. It ran Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, was only expected to cost $100, and was powered by an Ingenic Semiconductor JZ4770. Unfortunately, while ARM was running towards world domination, it never fully showed itself. Now he hopes to get a second chance.
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