Android is slowly coming into the RISC-V period. So far we have seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU structure “tier-1” assist in Android, placing RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has introduced the primary mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has introduced a timeline for developer tools through the Google Open Source Blog. The final publish is titled “Android and RISC-V: What you want to know to be prepared.”
Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to assist a brand new structure goes to take an unbelievable quantity of labor from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the muse for that work. First up, Google already has the “Cuttlefish” digital machine emulator working, together with a gif of it booting up. This is not the official “Android Emulator”—which is focused at app developers doing app growth—Cuttlefish is a {hardware} emulator for Android OS growth. It’s the identical thought because the Android Emulator however for the underside half of the tech stack—the kernel, framework, and {hardware} bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and different Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android construct with out messing with a person RISC-V machine. Google says it is working effectively sufficient now which you can obtain and emulate a RISC-V machine right this moment, although the corporate warns that nothing is optimized but.
The subsequent step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and working, and Google says: “By 2024, the plan is to have emulators accessible publicly, with a full characteristic set to take a look at purposes for numerous machine type elements!” The good factor about Android is that the majority app code is written with no structure in thoughts—it is all simply Java/Kotlin. So as soon as the Android RunTime begins spitting out RISC-V code, a whole lot of app code ought to Just Work. That means many of the porting work will want to go into issues written in the NDK, the native developer package, like libraries and video games. The emulator will nonetheless be nice for testing, although.
The publish additionally confirms, from Google’s facet this time, {that a} Qualcomm smartwatch would be the first RISC-V Android machine in the marketplace. With the Pixel Watch 2 switching SoCs from Samsung to Qualcomm, it positive appears like we’re on a collision course to see the Pixel Watch 3 or 4 use this Qualcomm RISC-V chip.