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The adoption of Android’s RISC-V free and open instruction set architecture (ISA) is gaining momentum. This architecture has been in the pipeline for quite a while as Google has been finding ways to implement it for Android devices. Google has been pulling the strings to bring RISC-V support to Android devices for quite a while now, and it’s already seeing some success.
Already, the Mountain View tech giant plans to bring support for these emulators by next year. There is currently a focus on ensuring that CPUs running this emulator will reach their full performance potential. Developers already have the tools necessary to build and run apps that support RISC-V on their machines.
These apps will feature the basic Android Open Source Project (AOSP) experience. At the moment, this technology is not yet ready for widespread usage on Android devices but is perfect for developer experimentation and collaboration. Google encourages developers to try this out as they work to ensure full compatibility with Android devices.
The Android RISC-V emulator is coming in 2024 and wearable devices might get it first
A few weeks ago, Qualcomm announced its partnership with Google to launch a RISC-V Wear OS chip. This is just one of the major steps towards the adoption of RISC-V on Android devices. By next year, Google will roll out emulators that’ll help test apps on all Android device form factors.
First on the list to get these emulators will be Wear OS devices that’ll use the coming Qualcomm chip. Possibly, coming chips for Android devices of other form factors will be able to get support for RISC-V as well. Once this support is available, the chips will be able to access all features necessary to achieve high performance.
RISC-V came into existence about 10 years ago, but its usage hasn’t been widespread. Now Google is bringing it to Android devices to improve performance. Last year at the RISC-V Summit, Google announced that it’ll be “accepting patches for RISC-V.”
From the summit up until this time, Google has continually matured support for RISC-V for Android. Developers are now free to test how this architecture will perform with their apps. Google is also preparing to make “NDK ABI finalized and canary builds available on Android’s public CI soon and RISC-V on x86-64 & ARM64 available for easier testing of riscv64 Android applications on a host machine.”
By next year, a more stable RISC-V emulator will be available for widespread usage. Until then, developers can continue using the tools available to test out this coming emulator. More information on the arrival of RISC-V on Android devices will become available in the coming months.