RISC-V International Announces Ratification of the RVA23 Profile Standard

RISC-V SUMMIT North America, Santa Clara, CA – Oct. 21, 2024

RISC-V International has announced the ratification of the RVA23 Profile, a significant development for RISC-V’s 64-bit application processors. This ensures software portability across different hardware implementations by standardizing which ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) features are mandatory or optional. This helps prevent vendor lock-in and simplifies development for software vendors, enabling them to target a wide range of RISC-V systems. The RVA23 Profile will accelerate adoption in toolchains and operating systems, supporting a larger RISC-V software ecosystem. The profile underwent extensive review before being ratified by the RISC-V Board of Directors.

The Vector and Hypervisor extensions are essential mandatory components of the RVA23 Profile, designed to support math-intensive tasks such as AI/ML and cryptography, as well as enterprise hardware, operating systems, and software workloads.

Key Components of RVA23 Include:

• Vector Extension: The Vector extension accelerates math-intensive workloads, including AI/ML, cryptography, and compression / decompression. Vector extensions yield better performance in mobile and computing applications with RVA23 as the baseline requirement for the Android RISC-V ABI. 
• Hypervisor Extension: The Hypervisor extension will enable virtualization for enterprise workloads in both on-premises server and cloud computing applications. This will accelerate the development of RISC-V-based enterprise hardware, operating systems, and software workloads. The Hypervisor extension will also provide better security for mobile applications by separating secure and non-secure components.

For more information you can read the official announcement on the RISC-V International website.