Champions of the open-standard ISA expect it to start displacing competitive offerings en masse over the next few years. While that remains to be seen, the introduction of custom RISC-V instruction extensions, the formation industry-specific working groups, and advances in tools are redefining the technology’s true winners.

Armv9 is here, and although it took nearly 10 years to arrive, it comes right at a major inflection point in the semiconductor industry where all of the major chipmakers have started dabbling in processor architectures outside of their heritage. The implications of this are currently being felt in more advanced use cases like the data center and high-performance computing, but the roadmap decisions of today – such as the massive emphasis on AI and ML workload processing in Armv9 that will surely continue under NVIDIA leadership – will  have significant ramifications for the embedded systems of tomorrow. And, oh yeah, what does NVIDIA’s potential stewardship of Arm mean for NVIDIA competitors who also happen to be Arm licensees, like Intel and Xilinix? Brandon and Rich discuss.

In this edition of the Embedded Insiders, Brandon and Rich discuss the semantics of AI and intelligent technology and what qualifies as a smart system these days.

Brandon and Rich wonder how the COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the tech sector, both from a financial perspective and with regards to the productivity of engineers now working at home.

Embedded World 2020 is right around the corner, and the Insiders spend a few minutes forecasting what they expect to see at the show. They interview Tom Doyle of Aspinity on analog computing in AI.

Brandon and Rich continue their journey into the world of open source, this time by focusing on Z-Wave and LoRa/LoRaWAN.

The Insiders attended the second annual RISC-V Summit in San Jose earlier this month, and brought back some significant opinions about the show, the technology, and the direction of the Foundation.