Qualcomm and four other significant semiconductor firms have officially joined forces to establish Quintauris, a company focused on developing "next-generation hardware" based on the RISC-V open-standard architecture (via Business Wire). The self-stated mission of Quintauris is to provide a single source for enabling RISC-V devices and promote standards for the RISC-V industry, which has been criticized for being prone to fragmentation.
RISC-V is an open-standard (or open-source, depending on who you ask) instruction set architecture (ISA) for CPUs that was first established in 2014, and is maintained by RISC-V International. The basic premise for RISC-V is that any company can take the ISA and make their own CPUs, bypassing the closed ecosystems of Arm, AMD, and Intel. Since its debut, RISC-V has grown extremely quickly, with 16 billion cores sold forecasted by 2030.
Qualcomm is invested in the production of Arm architecture-based chips, so it might seem unintuitive for the company to get into RISC-V too. However, Qualcomm has actually been using RISC-V for five years for its microcontrollers, as have many other companies. Qualcomm is also using RISC-V for its Snapdragon Wear Platform, alongside Google. As a reduced instruction set computer architecture (which is what RISC means), RISC-V is inherently minimalistic, and it's found a niche in small chips.
The open-standard or open-source nature of RISC-V makes collaboration between industry players easier, and Quintauris is a high-profile example of this. Qualcomm is just one of five partners involved in Quintauris, with the other four being Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, and NXP Semiconductors.
Bosch, Infineon, and NXP are unsurprising allies, as they joined TSMC to form the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in August. For its part, Qualcomm attempted to purchase NXP in 2016, though the deal fell through before it could be completed. Nordic Semiconductor is the odd one out and is by far the smallest member of the Quintauris venture, but it produces crucial wireless chips with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability.
According to its official website, Quintauris says its products will initially focus on the automotive industry and then later cater to mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The company is also focused on promoting standards for the RISC-V hardware-software ecosystem, and the implication appears to be that the launch of successful products developed by several big companies will help realize standardization.
Quintauris isn't the only organization seeking to inject standards into the world of RISC-V however, as there is also the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE). RISE has the official support of RISC-V International and key industry players such as Google, Intel, Nvidia, and even Qualcomm. While RISE concentrates on software, Quintauris will champion next-generation hardware development.
