Android is slowly coming into the RISC-V period. To this point we have seen Google say it desires to present the up-and-coming CPU structure “tier-1” help in Android, placing RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has introduced the primary mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Put on chip for smartwatches. Now Google has introduced a timeline for developer instruments through the Google Open Supply Weblog. The final put up is titled “Android and RISC-V: What you must know to be prepared.”

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to help a brand new structure goes to take an unimaginable quantity of labor from Google and builders, and these instruments are laying the muse for that work. First up, Google already has the “Cuttlefish” digital system emulator working, together with a gif of it booting up. This is not the official “Android Emulator”—which is focused at app builders doing app improvement—Cuttlefish is a {hardware} emulator for Android OS improvement. It is the identical concept because the Android Emulator however for the underside half of the tech stack—the kernel, framework, and {hardware} bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and different Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android construct with out messing with a person RISC-V system. Google says it is working effectively sufficient now which you can obtain and emulate a RISC-V system at the moment, although the corporate warns that nothing is optimized but.

The subsequent step is getting the Android Emulator (for app builders) up and working, and Google says: “By 2024, the plan is to have emulators out there publicly, with a full function set to check functions for numerous system kind elements!” The good factor about Android is that almost all app code is written with no structure in thoughts—it is all simply Java/Kotlin. So as soon as the Android RunTime begins spitting out RISC-V code, a number of app code ought to Simply Work. Which means a lot of the porting work might want to go into issues written within the NDK, the native developer equipment, like libraries and video games. The emulator will nonetheless be nice for testing, although.

The put up additionally confirms, from Google’s facet this time, {that a} Qualcomm smartwatch would be the first RISC-V Android system in the marketplace. With the Pixel Watch 2 switching SoCs from Samsung to Qualcomm, it certain seems like we’re on a collision course to see the Pixel Watch 3 or 4 use this Qualcomm RISC-V chip.