Tech industry moving away from ARM towards RISC-V

ARM seems on the way out as more and more major names in the tech industry are backing RISC-V. This is a new open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), it's royalty-free and it's designed to be used from the smallest embedded devices to huge data centers. It's much smaller than traditional ISAs, it provides a clean slate to build upon, while also allowing a high degree of modularity and extensibility.

We already knew NVIDIA and Western Digital were RISC-V adopters and now a new piece by The Information claims the list of RISC-V backers has grown to over 80 tech companies. Major new names include Google, Qualcomm, Tesla, and Samsung.

More than 80 tech companies including Google, Qualcomm and Samsung have joined together to develop a new open-source chip design that offers a much cheaper way to build chips for new technologies like autonomous vehicles. If the effort succeeds, it could seriously undercut SoftBank-owned Arm Holdings, which has been trying to extend its dominance in smartphone chips into new areas.

It's still early days, but there's hope RISC-V will result in cheaper and more customized chips than what's possible with ARM.