The ‘artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge’ guys are loving this – loving it because they need to save power while executing the highly repetitive calculations within their AI algorithms. Specialist hardware attached to the CPU is the most power-efficient way to do this.

So popular are custom instructions becoming, that Arm, the elephant in the embedded processing room, recently said it will offer them – something few thought that it would ever do.

So there is a ‘standardised but flexible’ instruction set for hardware developers, software developers and tool developers all to aim at. It is a free ‘standardised but flexible’ instruction set – but that instruction set still has to be implemented in a hardware architecture to make silicon chips.

Luckily for folk who don’t want to brew their own hardware design (some do) there is a growing number of companies ready to sell RTL (register transfer level intellectual property) that will execute your chosen Risc-V instruction set.

These companies include SiFive, founded by some of the people in at the beginning of Risc-V, and Western Digital. Taiwanese IP company, Andes Technology will even give customers a free Risc-V core design.

To support all this Risc-V hardware design activity, yet another industry body has sprung up: Chips Alliance, which not only lists SiFive and Western Digital among its membership, but also Google and Alibaba.

If you are not an SoC designer, you can still play with – and maybe adopt – a Risc-V core because Microchip, for example, has put a hard-wired quad-core 64-bit Risc-V processor alongside a programmable logic array in its PolarFire SoC, or GigaDevice will sell you GD32VF103, which came out in August.

For all these reasons – access to controlled free instructions sets, access to designed RTL and access to chips, not to mention the growing list of development tools – I will be watching Risc-V next year.

Oh, and about a year ago, the Risc-V Foundation began to collaborate with the Linux Foundation – and just look how successful that open-source software project, born in humble circumstances, has become.

(So says the guy typing on a computer running Linux. And, by the way, Seeed Studio will sell you a Risc-V processor Hat to clip on top of your Arm-based Raspberry Pi.)