| The Verilog code for the 4 RISC-V cores of various sizes is licensed with the Apache License. They are some of the best existing RISC-V cores. One of them was the fastest existing RISC-V core when it was introduced. You can use the Verilog code to either synthesize it for a FPGA and run it in a FPGA board with a large enough FPGA, or if you have access to an ASIC manufacturing process, you can synthesize it for that process and include the RISC-V cores together with whatever else is needed in a custom IC, without paying any royalties. Using one of these cores for a FPGA board seems very attractive, because most other open-source cores that are available have a much lower performance. They have also provided versions of the gcc compiler, of the glibc standard C library, of the boot loader, of the Android Bionic standard library and a few other software packages that are needed to run programs for Linux or Android on these RISC-V cores, which have many extensions over the base RISC-V specification. Alibaba appears to have played for a few years with RISC-V, but even if they have succeeded to design the fastest such cores, eventually they have decided to use ARMv9-A for their real high-performance server CPUs. |