The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a “tier 1 platform”on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC.
It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear”chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.”For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out “will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance.”
a joint venture
RISC-V, as the system CPU, will need a ton of work to become a viable Android platform. Developer SDKs, compilers, libraries, and a million other things all need to support the new architecture. Google is working on a giant to-do list to get the Android OS at a viable level on RISC-V. The good news is that, because normal Android apps are all written in Java (or Kotlin) and compiled for your device via the Android Runtime (ART), all Google needs to do for app support is make ART spit out RISC-V code, and the majority of app code will just work. The main exception is code written with Android NDK (Native Developer Kit), which allows for high-performance native code in C and C++. That’s going to be a lot of games (not relevant for wearables) and libraries.
An Android ecosystem for RISC-V needs to start somewhere, though, and this is where it’s starting. Qualcomm says the “commercial product launch of the RISC-V wearable based solution timing will be disclosed at a later date.”