From toaster to data center: RISC-V International ratifies RVA23 unified profile for future processors

RISC-V International has announced the ratification of the RVA23 profile. This is a significant development that is expected to help the open RISC-V architecture gain a stronger position against Arm and x86 while avoiding potential licensing issues.

RVA profiles are necessary to ensure software portability between different hardware implementations. Thus, software developers can avoid being tied to a specific hardware vendor. In other words, the same application will be able to function on any device equipped with processors with RISC-V architecture.

The RVA23 profile standardizes the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) instruction set. A key challenge is eliminating fragmentation within the RISC-V ecosystem. It is noted that as part of the ratification, the RVA23 profile went through a long process of development, review and approval in numerous working groups.

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RVA23 enables features such as vector operations, floating point instructions, and atomic instructions, which are required in many fields, including HPC, machine learning, and AI. In particular, vector extensions accelerate math-intensive workloads, including cryptography, (de-)compression, AI training, and more.

An important component of RVA23 is hypervisor support. This allows you to virtualize enterprise workloads both on local servers and in the cloud. In this way, hardware, OS, and application development for the RISC-V architecture can be accelerated. Virtualization support will also improve the security of mobile applications by separating secure and unsecured components.