Qualcomm and Google are expanding their collaboration on wearables in an interesting way, committing to creating a RISC-V-powered Snapdragon Wear platform for next-gen Wear OS experiences. We've already seen Google announce that RISC-V support is coming to Android, and given that Wear OS is based on Android, it makes a lot of sense.

For a primer on RISC-V (pronounced "risk five"), it's an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed and maintained by RISC-V International. It's referred to as an "open standard," meaning that any company that wants to use the stock RISC-V design is free to do so and modify it however it wants. This is in contrast to Arm, which is not an open standard and is controlled and licensed out to other companies by Arm Holdings in the United Kingdom. Arm is the primary standard that companies use currently in mobile and wearables.

There are a few reasons why RISC-V is beneficial. For starters, companies seeking to reduce their dependence on competitors or foreign entities will be looking in earnest at what this could potentially mean, even though this specifically still ultimately relies on Google and Qualcomm. Interestingly, Google already makes use of the RISC-V architecture for its Titan M2 security chip in the Google Pixel series, so it's not totally out of the blue and it seems that Google in particular has been keeping a close eye on RISC-V for a while.

However, there's an even bigger reason why companies may look to move away from Arm, and Qualcomm has one of the biggest personal reasons to want to. Arm is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Qualcomm over its Nuvia purchase, which isn't great when it's one of your biggest customers. As well, the company has been incredibly volatile. SoftBank, its owner, tried to sell the company to Nvidia, though that fell through, and the company recently held an IPO.

Presumably, developers won't need to do much to ensure their apps run on RISC-V Wear OS devices. On Android, ART basically "translates" bytecode into native instructions of the device that it's running on, so it would be translating to RISC-V instead of Arm. Native code is a different story, but Java code makes up the entirety of most Android apps, and that Java code will be handled for developers.

RISC-V is seen as an escape from western reliance, and a large part of this is because of RISC-V International's incorporation in Switzerland. It can act as a neutral party to both the US and China, making it an appealing option for companies looking to design chipsets. Alibaba is one of the biggest proponents of RISC-V, and engineers at the company ported Android 10 to a RISC-V board two years ago.

I imagine it will take a long time before we see a Snapdragon Wear RISC-V-powered wearable, but it's an exciting time regardless to see what may come about as a result of this collaboration. It seems more likely than ever that we'll eventually see some RISC-V-powered smartphones and smartwatches, and it will be really interesting to see what exactly those look like.