Cooperation and Competition Behind the Scenes in the RISC-V Community

RISC-V “is changing the way people build every single computer,” says Mark Himelstein, the former CTO at RISC-V International. He joins us to explain the significance of the RISC-V ISA, open standard development challenges, and read poetry.

Over the course of his fascinating career, Mark Himelstein has worked on several significant computing technologies at historic companies like MIPS and Sun Microsystems. He has also worked as a consultant in various roles that include architect, VP of engineering, and advisor. However, RISC-V may have a greater impact on the computing field and our world than any of those previous efforts.

The RISC-V open standard ISA is revolutionizing IC design and computing. Image used courtesy of Adobe

Himelstein gives us an insider's view of the open standard process that is often “cooperation and competition, simultaneously.”

“The thing that keeps us as a community is the effort in the software ecosystem. Nobody wants to really go off and go on their own. They just don't want to do it. It's just too costly. I don't care if you're the biggest company in the world or the tiniest.”

Listen in on this episode of the Moore’s Lobby podcast as Daniel Bogdanoff and Himelstein chat about a wide range of interesting topics that include:

How Himelstein encourages people to get involved with RISC-V by telling them to not just complain about something but join in to help make it better.
The significance of vector operations for computing and how those advantages may soon be extended to matrix operations within the ISA.
Three major things RISC-V is currently working on for future release.

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Meet Mark Himelstein

At the time of our recording, Mark Himelstein was the Chief Technology Officer at RISC-V International. RISC-V International is the global, non-profit organization that provides oversight of the open standard RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). With thousands of members scattered around the world, RISC-V International leads this community in the development of RISC-V open specifications through technical, industry, domain, and special interest groups.

During his tenure at RISC-V International, Mark helped build a scalable organization that grew from less than 20 groups to over 70 today. During his time at the helm, they also ratified close to 40 new specifications.

Before joining RISC-V International, Mark was the President of Heavenstone (and he has now returned to that position). Heavenstone provides hardware and software product architecture, analysis, mentoring, and interim management.

Previously, Mark started Graphite Systems, Inc. (acquired by EMC), where he was the VP of Engineering and CTO developing large Analytics Appliances using highly integrated Flash memory. Prior to Graphite, Mark held positions as the CTO of Quantum Corp, Vice President of Solaris development engineering at Sun Microsystems, and other technical management roles at Apple, Infoblox, and MIPS.

Mark has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Math from Wilkes University in Pennsylvania and a master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California Davis/Livermore. In addition to publishing numerous technical papers and holding many patents, he is the author of the book “100 Questions to Ask Your Software Organization”.