Open source hardware: the rise of RISC-V

While open source software is taking over the world, a push for open source hardware has been quietly building.

The RISC-V Foundation has been pushing its open sourced instruction set architecture for chips based on the long-established paradigms for reduced instruction set computing. And one of its most vocal advocates is Calista Redmond, the chief executive of the RISC-V Foundation, which is working to promote its adoption.

This is a slow burn. RISC-V won't change the world overnight, but will slowly but surely seep into every corner of the computing industry - and looking at the incompatible, closed-source mess that is the ARM world, we really need RISC-V on all those millions of embedded devices we use every day.