Apple investigating RISC-V instruction set architecture, job listing shows

A job listing posted to Apple's website this week reveals the company is researching RISC-V instruction set architecture solutions, suggesting future in-house chip designs might implement the open-source technology.

The posting for a "RISC-V High Performance Programmer" was published to Apple's corporate jobs website on Thursday and seeks a programmer experienced with RISC-V architectures. An ideal candidate also has a working knowledge of NEON micro architecture in ARM CPU cores.

Programmers hired for the task will join Apple's Vector and Numerics Group, which is responsible for "designing, enhancing and improving various embedded subsystems running on iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS."

As noted by Tom's Hardware, which spotted the post earlier today, it appears that Apple is already deploying RISC-V, at least internally. The company is not known to have incorporated the ISA into a shipping product.

"You will work in a SW and HW cross functional team which is implementing innovative RISC-V solutions and state of the art routines," the listing reads. "This is to support the necessary computation for such things as machine learning, vision algorithms, signal and video processing."

RISC-V is a relatively new instruction set that is typically used in low-performance applications, though the architecture is rapidly expanding with input from collaborative partners.

How Apple intends to integrate RISC-V is unknown, though the company could effectively avoid licensing fees for ARM vector cores by adopting the architecture. All current Apple Silicon designs, including A- and M-Series SoCs as well as the S-Series and other system-in-package designs, utilize custom ARM cores.

RISC-V integration is unlikely to overtake ARM, at least in the near-term. Apple's investment in customized ARM-based processor technology is substantial and has produced a balanced platform that is unrivaled in its efficiency and performance.

18 Comments

michelb76 695 comments · 8 Years

About 3 years ago

Interesting. Apart from the licensing freedom this could make interesting new computing devices.

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

The unending quest for total and absolute control of the product without being dependent on a third party as much as possible. It’s part of the reason for Apple’s success and popularity.

Cesar Battistini Maziero 403 comments · 8 Years

I'm sure ARM sells the architecture and innovation to competitors.

Now that Apple cut the bonds with intel, we know that Intel would sell apples custom chips (like the original MacBook Air) 1 year after release, to competitors.

Apple had a very heavy hand on that and many other intel chip designs.

nadriel 92 comments · 5 Years

RISC-V processors are already used in multitude of specialised cases: Seagate is testing them for creating "enable massive parallel computational" storage solutions; Nvidia uses RISC-Vs in their GPUs, likely handling some IO, ("and beyond"); Western Digital is going for RISC-V controllers to their hard drives.

Don't take my words as gospel, but one of the advantages of RISC-V (as an ISA) over ARM (and x86) is that it doesn't carry baggage from ages ago. Not that information theory and computation theory has really advanced so far that they're from a different universe, but some things can be done more efficiently with modern approaches. Benchmarks made by RISC-V developers highlight some specifics where their platform has an advantage over the others, but in general the difference is really really small or goes to something like +/- 5% difference in a specific compilation on a specific compiler (like GCC). Note the minus.

The other advantage is that it's really "modular (core is really small) and easy to customise" and create custom instructions for ASIC purposes (for example for handling high amount of IO in a GPU). Even if it's free and open source, the same problem comes around as with other ISAs, if you want something done, you need to hire people or buy the service if you can't do it yourself.

I'd see the RISC-V becoming a huge thing in accelerators and in some specific controllers (Power, USB, Modem etc.) within the next 5 years. Even if there are already some machines running Linux on RISC-V, they are low performance and have a really long uphill way to become even remotely mainstream.

gatorguy 24609 comments · 13 Years

I would not be shocked if Apple uses this to join up with Open Titan development.