Learn more about RISC-V
Why and where to find out more about the RISC-V ISA, and how to try it out.
Resources to learn more about RISC-V.
In RISC-V Part 1: Origins and Architecture we had the briefest of looks at the RISC-V architecture itself. In this post we have some resources to learn more about RISC-V.
Before diving in to learn more about RISC-V, it’s worth stopping to ask why?
Almost no-one, at the moment, has a ‘user programmable’ RISC-V device. It’s possible to buy some single board computers but they are nowhere near as popular as their Arm counterparts, like the Raspberry PI.
Most of those 10 billion RISC-V CPUs that have been shipped are hidden away and inaccessible on disk drives, GPUs and so on.
So why would anyone learn more about RISC-V. In particular, why would anyone learn some RISC-V assembly language?
First, the direction of travel is clear. RISC-V will be an important ISA. The founders’ ambitions to be ‘the standard ISA for all computing devices’ may or may not be realised, but more and more devices will use RISC-V. These are likely to include servers, more single board computers and even smartphones.
Second, as we’ve already seen, the 32-bit RV32I RISC-V integer base is very small, at just 40 instructions. That makes it much more straightforward to learn the basics of the architecture and be confident that you can write useful code. This is another case where the modularity of RISC-V, with a small number of ‘base’ ISAs and a number of extensions, plays dividends.
Finally, the open nature of RISC-V means that we can learn not only what the ISA does, but also why it was designed that way. As the ISA has developed the designers have provided material explaining why they made some of their key decisions.
So let’s see where we can learn more about RISC-V, and even try some RISC-V code in the browser.
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