Andes Technology fully embraced the open-source ISA as part of its IPO strategy. Arm now faces the same choice.
Arm ecosystem (Image: Arm)
What’s at stake?
Andes Technology, a Taiwanese CPU core IP company, began phasing out its proprietary processing architecture in favor of RISC-V in 2015, as it prepared to go public. Is adding RISC-V an option for Arm before its planned fiscal-2022 IPO? While Arm’s too-big-to-fail ecosystem makes this notion unlikely, can Arm convince investors and shareholders that it can continue to grow without an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA)?