We asked, you told us: You’re intrigued by a RISC-V Android phone

RISC-V is a rival computing architecture to Arm, and it’s been gaining steam over the last few years. However, it recently got a major boost when Google announced that Android will support this new architecture.

An Android-powered RISC-V smartphone is still a long way off, but we wanted to know whether you’d buy one. We posted the poll last week, and here’s how you answered it.

Would you buy a RISC-V Android phone?

Results

Almost 1,900 votes were tallied in this poll after we posted the accompanying article last week. The most popular pick? Well, 51.37% of respondents said they’d buy a RISC-V phone if it were on par with current Arm-based smartphones.

This is an understandable stance, as we’d imagine that many people don’t care about their phone’s underlying architecture as long as everything works. But RISC-V is also an open-source architecture, meaning we could potentially have a wider variety of processors and cheaper devices too.

Meanwhile, 45.68% of surveyed readers said they’d buy a RISC-V Android phone for sure. This result suggests that there are some people out there who are willing to buy a RISC-V phone even if it’s missing some features compared to an Arm-based Android phone.

Finally, just 2.95% of respondents said they wouldn’t buy a RISC-V Android phone at all. Chips based on the new architecture are still a step or two behind the latest Arm-based silicon, while Arm chips also enjoy more features at this point.

Comments

• jim worrall: Google just gutted ARM’s long term value and gave Qualcomm an incentive to migrate to RISC-V. ARM should not have bullied Qualcomm.
• Rick: I welcome our new reduced instruction set overlords. More specifically, I expect RISC-V to challenge the incumbents in all parts of the computing ecosystem, from low-power to highest performance. And I’m patiently waiting for any of several dev boards I’ve ordered to release and ship.
• disqus_d1b9jeAcZN: I’m glad that Google is taking such a bold stance here, but I don’t really trust Google to commit to anything, especially hardware. Having another architecture that’s widely deployed would finally provide some justification for still compiling to bytecode.