Google has explained the progress in porting Android to the RISC-V processor architecture, which was announced at the beginning of the year. Accordingly, there are now enough patches for the free version of Android (AOSP, Android Open Source Project) to get an emulator running with RISC-V, like a short GIF video in the blog entry shows.
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However, the Android runtime ART and the compiler have not yet been fully optimized. At least the RISC-V extensions that AOSP requires are fixed: rva22, vector and vector crypto. The RISC-V-NDK should be ready this year and the emulator will be ready in 2024.
It starts with wearables
The first devices with the new processors will probably be wearables, in collaboration with Qualcomm, which announced a few days ago that it would also develop one with RISC-V in addition to all of its ARM processors. It is still unclear whether we are talking about simple fitness bracelets like Fitbit Charge or smartwatches. So far, smartwatches with the Android version Wear OS and ARM processors can hardly last more than a day, while fitness bracelets from the now Google subsidiary Fitbit have battery life of a week or more.
(yeah)