推荐序

The future of RISC-V is unlimited

When we first created RISC-V in our lab at the University of California, Berkeley, we wanted a simple, efficient, extensible design we could use openly in our research. It soon became clear, however, that if we got it right, an open-standard ISA would bring important change to the chip industry, much like Wi-Fi, Linux and other open standards have changed the electronics world for the better. The skeptics told us we could never compete against the two big incumbents(x86 and ARM) and that RISC-V would never be good for anything more than embedded applications. Here in 2023, eight years since the founding of SiFive, the RISC-V community is truly global, with more than 3,950 members of the organizing body, RISC-V International, and billions of RISC-V-enabled chips shipping each year. Today SiFive is enabling innovators by delivering high performance, low power products with superior compute density that rival the performance of the fastest competition. We thought the idea would be popular, but we never dreamed how rapidly it would take hold around the world.

So what is it about RISC-V that is so popular? First, it is an open standard, and so users are not locked in to a single vendor, enabling many vendors to compete to provide the best processor designs for each market segment. Second, RISC-V is a modern architecture designed for today’s workloads and dataflows. Third, RISC-V allows flexibility and supports innovative new designs. And with each evolution the whole ecosystem grows stronger with thousands of companies supporting.

The authors have put together a textbook that incorporates the most recent RISC-V innovations and explains the most important concepts with simple examples. Ideal for software developers, students and chip professionals looking to understand this fast-growing phenomenon, the book provides valuable definitions and clear examples. It comes at a pivotal time, as China continues to embrace RISC-V and the applications for it expand across verticals like datacenter, infrastructure, consumer, automotive and more. RISC-V is proving to be a superior choice for AI, ADAS and many of today’s latest applications, and as people design from scratch, it’s an easy way to speed time-to-market.

Whether you’re a student just getting started, or a seasoned professional looking to understand this fast-moving market, this book will help you understand the key principles and the innovation inside of RISC-V. We are proud of how RISC-V has grown and look forward to its future, which we like to say, is unlimited. Welcome to the ecosystem, we look forward to hearing what you do with RISC-V.

以下是英文推荐序的译文。