SemiWiki.com - Podcast EP294: An Overview of the Momentum and Breadth of the RISC-V Movement with Andrea Gallo

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Dan is joined by Andrea Gallo, CEO of RISC-V International, the non-profit home of the RISC-V instruction set architecture standard, related specifications, and stakeholder community. Prior to joining RISC-V International, Gallo worked in leadership roles at Linaro for over a decade. He built Linaro’s server engineering… Read More

Hello, my name is Daniel Nenny, founder of SemiWiki, the open forum for semiconductor professionals. Welcome to the Semiconductor Insiders podcast series. My guest today is Andrea Gallo, CEO of Risk5 International, the nonprofit home of the Risk5 instruction set architecture, standard, related specifications, and stakeholder community. Prior to joining RISC-V International, Gallo worked in leadership roles at Linaro for over a decade. He built Linaro's server engineering team from the ground up. He later managed the Linaro data center and cloud, home, mobile, networking, IoT, and

embedded segment groups and underlying open source collaborative projects. In addition to driving the company's membership acquisition strategy as vice president of business development. Welcome to the podcast, Andrea. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's nice having you back.

You know, you were recently appointed as the CEO of RISC-V International, so I wanted to catch up with you. What is your vision as the CEO of RISC-V International, so I wanted to catch up with you. What is your vision as the CEO and what are the first priorities you're focusing on? Well, first of all, full continuity with the roadmap and the actions initiated by Kalista Redmond, our previous CEO. And as she hired me into my previous role, and the board confirmed me now in this new role as CEO. So first of all, there is full continuity

with the direction that Calista had set in the past, and she did an amazing job. So first of all, it's my credits to our previous CEO. So the focus is on continuing the great momentum that we are seeing with Bris5 and focus on the commercialisation of Bris5 into new areas and growth into important verticals. For example, HPC and data center, AI, automotive, recently space. These will all make our ecosystem and our membership more successful. And then the other very important priorities to us are certification and the focus on improving the developer experience and also continuing to support the execution of all

the technical activities, specifications, task groups and special interest groups. Right. So now that the RISC-V Summit Europe has wrapped, I mean it was very successful I've read, what are some of your key takeaways from the event? There was a great momentum at the event. We had visitors from all around the world. The sponsorship area with all the booths was packed. We could see a great buzz

and we could see all the attendees and delegates attending all the events, still the last one in today, but also in the common areas having lots of discussions, engaged discussions. We had very important talks and panels. We had talks from the European Union officers being in Europe for the summit having the EU officers and the European Union that is a funding significant projects in RISC-V thanks to the European Cheap Act. So having the European officers was a very important message to us both for automotive and for the HPC areas. We had two different talks from the offices.

And also, I would like to recall some of the important panels. The first one was with industry leaders from the automotive ecosystem. So we had Cariad, Infinion, Cordasip, ResilTech, Cortus, and there was a very important panel with all the industry leaders sharing plans and how RISC-V can help them be successful in automotive. We also had another important panel that was with the Linux operating system distributions. So for the first time on stage, we had Red Hat, Canonical, Susie all together. And also on the software side, we announced that we upgraded our membership in the Yocto project to the platinum level together with our, I would say cousins, from the RISE project. So together RISC-V and RISE, the RISC-V software ecosystem project, together we upgraded our membership in Yocto to the platinum level, which to me is a very important step for the

wider RISC-V ecosystem. It means that Yocto will be built and tested on RISC-V and Yocto is the most pervasive embedded Linux distribution used in a variety of verticals. And having the Yocto project test every release on RISC-V, ensuring kernel testing and LTS is very important for the software ecosystem in addition to all the hardware work at RISC-V. And some of the talks also sparked real progress. For example, there was a keynote by Scaleway. So being in Europe for the summit, I like highlighting some of the talks that come from Europe, as much as in the past I highlighted talks from the US for the US summit. And so in this case, Scaleway, they described how they achieved having a commercial cloud offering based on RISC-V nodes in the cloud. out. And their talk described all the steps to achieve that and the pain they have been

through as every innovator exploring new fields. And what that sparked was a call to action to contribute to the RISC-V SOC specification, server SOC specification that was recently ratified, and the RISC-V server platform that is now being finalized. And these cover exactly the same topics that Scaleway have been through. So having a unified hardware and software interfaces for a server grade platform, adopting industry standards like UEFI and ACPI and OpenBMC and more.

And I'm really excited that a couple of weeks ago the UEFI forum released the latest ACPI version 6.6 and this includes support for RISC-V platforms. So overall the summit was very hectic with a lot of good discussions both on the hardware side, the specifications, evolutions, roadmap and also software. Impressive, impressive. Can we look back a little bit? You know RISC-V recently turned 15. Can you talk about RISC-V's journey from its academic roots to real world deployment and speak to which industries you're seeing the most adoption of RISC-V? Yeah, RISC-V as you recall started in 2010 as the fifth incarnation of RISC, which started in the in the

early 80s thanks to Dave Patterson, Professor Dave Patterson at UC Berkeley. And I was chatting with Christa Zanowicz, one of the authors of RISC-V and chief architect at RISC-V International. And he recalls that at one of the first Hot Ships symposium in 2014, they were expecting, they had a small booth and they were expecting a few people to show up and ask some interesting questions. And he was blown away by having 40 companies attending

and willing to work together. That was 2014, just four years after starting. And then another big step was 2016, when NVIDIA announced that they planned to replace the proprietary Falcon cores with RISC-V. And by the way, a few months ago at our summit, North America summit last October, Nvidia in the keynote, they estimated that just in 2024, they probably manufactured one billion of RISC-V cores because they embed between 10 and 30 or even 40 cores in every

NVIDIA GPU. So that gives you an idea of the incredible momentum. And in 2016, back to 2016, not only NVIDIA but also Andes and Western Digital announced they were switching to RISC-V. So in just a few years from something that started in 2010, in May 2010 between Professor Krista Zanowich and some of his students, Andrew Walter, Marie Young, and Suu Pli, in just a few years, there was already a first incredible commercial adoption. And today, there are over 10 billion RISC-V cores in the market from embedded microcontrollers, of course, but also RISC-V is ubiquitous in AI. I was mentioning NVIDIA and the GPUs. It's also public knowledge that Meta is using AI

in their cloud accelerators for inference and training. And then there are so many innovative companies like TenStorent, Andes, Accelera, all very, very strong producing innovative chips for AI. And high-performance computing with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and European projects like EuroHPC and recently the DARE project by the EU that is funding 240 million euros for HPC platforms based on RISC-V. And automotive is another one. Just before Embedded Word in March,

Infineon announced officially that the roadmap of automotive microcontrollers is now fully based on RISC-V. We have an automotive SIG at RISC-V, and Infineon has a chair position driving all the analysis of how to best use RISC-V in automotive. And a couple of months ago I was in Sweden in Gothenburg for the RISC-V in space workshop that was co-organized by Frontgrade, a mighty European space agency. by FrontGrade, a mighty European space agency. And we had 200 speakers, 200 RISC-V projects.

And this was a natural follow-up to a similar workshop organized by Microchip, Sci5 and NASA in the US a couple of years ago. And NASA even released a white paper describing the concept of high-performance space computing based on RISC-V. So all these areas, industries, verticals are seeing an incredible traction with RISC-V. That's just amazing. So you mentioned AI. How do you see RISC-V continuing to evolve

to meet the needs of more advanced computing cases like AI and you also mentioned automotive which has an AI component? Correct. I see different technical paths. One is on the performance side. We're working on the matrix extensions. so operations on matrix which are really important for AI and together with this we will also continuously monitor new data formats. For example, last year we've verified the support for the BFLOT-16 format which is really important for AI. So matrix and new data formats is one track that is always ongoing and is critical to provide more optimized performance.

Another track is security. So, a trusted execution environment from static, let's say secure, non-secure modes up to confidential computing. These are all very important steps that go from an ECU running AutoSAR up to a central compute that requires multiple domains between an infotainment, an Android automotive OS or an AGL and instrumentation

clusters, telematics, all need to be well isolated. And so these technologies are areas that RISC-V is heavily investing in altogether as an ecosystem. And we are providing, we're bringing the best solutions to the market together with all the members. And many, many members today already have IPs and SOCs that are already safety certified for ISO 26262, ASIL-B or D and some are already used in volumes with some automobile manufacturers. The technology, the safety certification, the ecosystem is very important. Engaging with the various ecosystems, software integrators, OEMs, tier ones, it's really important. That's why we launched the automotive SIG last year.

And the European projects for software-defined vehicles is also acting as an initial ignition for the activities. So overall, there's the implicit, intrinsic flexibility of RISC-V that can easily adapt to new technical requirements and can scale with the same ISA, with the same architecture. It can easily scale, thanks to the modular components, from a very simple, very tiny ECU up to a central compute across AI. You were mentioning correctly, AI is a fundamental element nowadays in automotive, in a zonal controller, for example, where you perform inference on all the data

coming from all the various sensors in a car. And I like to refer to the zonal controllers as the edge computing in a car. And so having the same architecture, the same ISA from a tiny ECU to a central compute processor is also very important for the developers. Yeah, I think these are all the ingredients that we're working on and that will make us successful in AI and automotive. And what are the biggest opportunities and challenges you see for accelerating the global adoption of RISC-V?

The verticals that I mentioned, the data center, automotive space, AI as an ubiquitous technology, these are an important area. Certification is very important. RISC-V is very flexible. Everyone can handcraft their RISC-V core to perfectly fit their needs in terms of capabilities, functionalities and die size. At the same time, we also introduce the concept of profiles. So setting the bar high for specific areas, for example, an application processor for data center and automotive high performance computing. Last year, we ratified the RVA23 profile specification. This mandates the minimum set of extensions mandatory to set the bar high.

By having the common set of specifications, this also allows the operating system vendors to target the RVA23 as the platform to build and release their distribution for. And these then provide guarantees, binary compatibility for the applications. So certification associated to the RISC-V specifications, the RISC-V standards and certification for the profiles is another area that will be very important. Our membership in Yocto is critical for the developer experience and for all the device makers and individual developers who need an embedded Linux with an LTS support. And overall, our very tight collaboration with RISE, RISC-V software ecosystem project is critical to enable the developers in the ecosystem. And the opportunity here is that RISC-V

is seen as the solution to enabling a strategy for digital sovereignty for countries, Europe, North America, China, but also Brazil, for example, is very engaged with RISC-V since last year. So RISC-V enables local developments and building talents in all the geographies. It enables multinational companies to build and control their destiny because there are no license fees or licensing schemes to adopt RISC-V and they can either develop their RISC-V implementations internally or choose between multiple RISC-V IP providers, all aligned to the RISC-V standards that we release. So RISC-V is enabling local investment in geographies in companies and at the same time is enabling these engagements at the global level across all

Boundaries, so risk five is really promoting innovation worldwide Great Final question and rep looking ahead. What does success look like for risk five over the next decade? We will see risk five as the default ISA of choice for every new design. According to the SHD group, already in 2031, RISC-V will be shipping 20 billion in 20 billion chips with multiple RISC-V cores in each and we will have a market share between 26 and 39% across all the various verticals.

And that will be in just six years. So in 10 years, I'm sure we will have a strong and vibrant software ecosystem and we will have a highly engaged ecosystem across all our application spaces. Great, thank you for your time, Andrea. This is a interesting discussion. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you for having me again and for all the questions. Much appreciated. That concludes our podcast. Thank you all for listening and have a great day.