Summary

This chapter introduced the RISC-V processor architecture and its instruction set. The RISC-V architecture defines a complete user-mode and privileged instruction set specification and several extensions to support general-purpose computing, high-performance computing, and embedded applications requiring minimal code size. RISC-V processors are offered commercially, and free open-source products are available to implement RISC-V in FPGA devices.

Having completed this chapter, you should understand the architecture and features of the RISC-V processor and its optional extensions.

You learned the basics of the RISC-V instruction set and now understand how RISC-V can be tailored to target a variety of application domains, from low-end micropower embedded systems to warehouse-scale cloud server farms. You also learned how to implement a RISC-V processor in a low-cost FPGA board.

The next chapter introduces the concept of processor virtualization, where rather than...