Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit promises official, polished support:
Over the holiday break, the footage from the recent "RISC-V Summit" was posted for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up to profess its love for the up-and-coming CPU architecture?
[...] Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September.
The build system is up and running, and anyone can grab the latest "riscv64" branch whenever they want—and yes, in line with its recent Arm work, Google wants RISC-V on Android to be 64-bit only. For now, the most you can get is a command line, and Bergstrom's slide promised "initial emulator support by the start of 2023, with Android RunTime (ART) support for Java workloads following during Q1."
[...] Once Google does get Android up and running on RISC-V, then it will be up to manufacturers and the app ecosystem to back the platform. What's fun about the Android RunTime is that when ART supports RISC-V, a big chunk of the Android app ecosystem will come with it. Android apps ship as Java code, and the way that becomes an ARM app is when the Android Runtime compiles it into ARM code. Instead, it will soon compile into RISC-V code with no extra work from the developer. Native code that isn't written in Java, like games and component libraries, will need to be ported over, but starting with Java code is a big jump-start.
[...] RISC-V is seen as a way to be less reliant on the West. While the project started at UC Berkeley, RISC-V International says the open source architecture is not subject to US export law. In 2019, the RISC-V Foundation actually moved from the US to Switzerland and became "RISC-V International," all to try to avoid picking a side in the US-China trade war. The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. One Chinese company hit by US export restrictions, the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been the leading force in bringing RISC-V support to Android, and with Chinese companies playing a huge part in the Android ecosystem, it makes sense that Google would throw open the doors for official support. Now we just need someone to build a phone.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday January 06, @03:55AM (1 child)
Obviously the Google is barely trailing Huawei on this, for example open sourced BishengJDK for RISCV64G was released 2020 already.
You better pace up, guys!
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday January 06, @04:41PM
I don't see how Google is behind on this seeing how Huawei's BishengJDK is a downstream distro of OpenJDK (hosted on gitee) and their Risc-V work was and is being upstreamed back to OpenJDK which was already included in a stable OpenJDK release a few months ago so it's already part of the Android SDK.
Real, market-mature, made-in-China hardware wise, there's really only the MCUs like the Espressif ones and maybe the Allwinner D1 that could compete with the Pi Zero in some applications. And while there were / are a few other XuanTie cores based products like the TH1520, I've yet to see them making it to market so I suspect by the time they do they'll be outmatched by the various StarFive (Taiwanese) SoCs on both price and performance.
So, from both the software and the hardware perspective, Google has years to catch up.
compiling...