Recently the RISC-V Fifth Workshop took place at Google in Mountain View. As always, there were lots of presentations from academics. RISC-V has been a big hit there as the only instruction set architecture that is feasible for use in teaching and research, others being either too complicated or involving too many lawyers, or both. 

But for me the most interesting aspect of the workshop are the companies producing silicon and providing routes to silicon. If RISC-V is going to be more than an academic curiosity, which I firmly believe, then it needs to have commercial chips and it needs to have systems built around them. I already talked about SiFive in RISC-V Available in Silicon. Another player is Codasip and their partners. 

CodePlay provides support for a layered programming model from graph-based programming, normal C/C++, down to assembly language and VHDL. There is a focus on machine learning and vision, which will be important in many applications. 

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