 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Vancouver for Open Source Summit 2023. I'm John Furrier, Bob Stretche. My co-host, got a great guest here, Callista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, Open Source Instruction Set. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Great to be here. So we've got a great view here. We're looking out in the water here in Vancouver. Great venue, Open Source Summit. Interesting time and place here. Open Source has kind of won the game. Proprietary software kind of leveled out. It's the industry dynamic. All aspects of the ecosystems are emerging. You're starting to see ecosystems. You're involved in one RISC-V. Talk about your ecosystem. What are you guys doing? What's the project? You know, I think it's really interesting when you think about the arc of history. You're like, wow, you know, Open Source rules everything. Proprietary is no longer on trend, right? When you look back historically, it was about 20 years ago, 22 years ago, in about 2001 that everyone was flustered about, you know, certain organizations kind of, you know, kind of owning the software stack or, you know, a license for a piece of hardware automatically came with a license for someone else's software. And that frustration led to massive investment in Linux, right? Open Source software. So IBM went and planted a billion dollar flag on Linux and said, you know what? We can have proprietary plus Open Source. Let's play in both. Fast forward 20 years, here we are. And the world has gotten fairly flustered with someone else controlling their destiny at the micro-architecture level. So instruction set architectures, you for the most part have two flavors out there intel and arm. And the world said, you know what? My strategic investments and future is controlled by these other companies. What if there was an open option? And that's really where risk five is taking off as an open standard instruction set. And I would draw the distinction not as much on open source software but it's more like open standards. So do you remember when proprietary networking happened in all the data centers? That's right, all those stuff. Bingo and that drove decisions on what you put in your data center. Wow, who's controlling your destiny, right? Okay, along comes Ethernet, the game change. Ethernet is a global standard that says compose your data center however you wish. So that's why we're taking it as a global standard to compose your micro-architecture how you wish. Because this is a huge point because I remember those days, OSI model and there was a seven layer stack. And what really happened was it was the physical data link layers of the ones that were the most important at the bottom of the stack. The rest were kind of then TCP happy came and then the rest was just app layer but TCP started Cisco but that standards made everything happen. That created a massive wealth creation, innovation wave that we all look back on and take for granted. We've been covering supercomputing, supercomputing, you're seeing silicon in the clouds. We're seeing a super stack that's what we're calling it on the cube, a super stack model. Super compute, physical, chip, data center, super cloud layer and now it's super app layer with AI built in up and down the stack. This is the developer framework that we're seeing is this super stack phenomenon. You guys play right into that where the developers are in charge. What do you think about that concept of super stack? Yeah, well the concept only works if you have some level of freedom. Freedom to pick and choose between what platforms you're going to run on, how can I be portable among those platforms? Developers are demanding and insisting on that kind of experience. So having the freedom of choice and the freedom of design go hand in hand and so you are seeing that and you are seeing sort of this renaissance around custom processing. I mean the growth in semiconductors alone is saying like a one size fits all approach doesn't have to work because we can take a custom approach and get to scale in volume as well. Whether it's adding AI onto existing data center workloads, adding even more capabilities into that cell phone. We have RISC-5 processors helping to support the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in cell phones all over Asia today. We see them adding AI and acceleration capabilities and everything from data centers at Alibaba to HPC machines in the European Union. So you're seeing that freedom of design meet up with that choice. We've been talking about hardware matters on theCUBE and hardware is now software. Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing is and I think people are trying to look at it if you see, I mean obviously you have the AWS's of the world, my former employer, so they go out and build their own under the hood types of stuff and other cloud guys are doing the same. How do you see that really impacting the uptake of what you're doing versus what they're doing where it's just abstracted and it's hey don't worry about this, it's under the hood versus actually bringing people in to get involved at that lower level. So the value drivers are different depending on the stakeholder, right? So if you look at the stakeholder as the cloud provider, they want to lever down costs, they want to increase energy efficiency, reduce blueprint of data centers to use the same workloads while increasing their competitive value by weaving in AI and accelerated workloads so they can attract more customers and grow. So their motivations are very specific to composing the best semiconductor as well as system, as well as network, as well as you name it as a developer platform comes next that they can possibly deliver because any pennies on that is going to have a very substantial impact on their business and so the cloud providers or the hyperscale themselves has a very different strategic intent than the developer, right? Who wants to have portability across multiple different types of cloud as well as be able to take advantage of AI, be able to take advantage of, you know, any of the other capabilities that come with that. So motivations change, but at the end of the day for both of them, they want a composable environment and that composable environment could be in the hardware or at the platform level. Talk about the use cases that you see with risk five. What are the hot areas that developers are working on? As you mentioned, you get the Bluetooth example, Wi-Fi example. We're seeing a lot of innovation in hardware right now and not to say that speeds and fees were added, but I remember like go back a few years, Rob, every event, the big company's like, don't talk speeds and feeds, we're solutions. And like, ultimately, people want the, no one wants to run their workload on slower infrastructure. I mean- Well, it depends. If it's policy-based, maybe. What's the use case? Well, no, I say it depends because it's sort of analogous to, do you want to put in gold-plated plumbing in your house? Well, those plastic pipes do just fine, right? So right size it and get the right tool for the job. And that has a lot to do with power and speeds and feeds and what have you. What are the challenges you're trying to meet? So where's risk five going? We started seeing a lot in embedded and IoT and some of those form factors that said, I need, you know, lots of these, but they're really kind of a small, you know, kind of piece of the whole puzzle. And that has now moved into, I want to use risk five to gain a competitive differentiator in my system or in my overall solution. And so you're starting to see things creep up, you know, more of the value chain as we in parallel grow the ecosystem around some of those heavier workloads. And so that's where you're starting to see, you know, additional capability added into existing investments. And that's important. That's important because if you're sitting at a large multinational and you've got a massive investment already in a particular architecture, let's say one of those other two that I mentioned and you go to the boss and say, you know what? Today, let's rip that out and like throw in some risk five and everything's going to be wonderful. What about the millions invested? The system's already being supported. All the other surround that happens for those existing investments. So multinationals are taking some of those baby steps. So some of those, you know, near term, like let's get our feet wet. Let's, you know, start there. Where you see a lot of venture capital is investing in, you know, more startups and design houses on risk five than any other architecture in history, saying like, all right, but what can we do new and different? And so you see companies like Esperanto or Andes or Sci-Fi or MIPS and others coming out with data center class chips because they don't have some of those legacy decisions that they're going to have to rest on. And so that's where you're sharing to see that next frontier move up the value chain or up the- How's the supply chain issues been impacting the developers? Has that been a factor? So when you think about supply chain, it's also, you know, it can start to get into some of the political boundaries between different things. The supply chain has definitely affected across the industry, but what you're starting to understand is that the more there are constraints in the system of actually getting the hardware that you want, the more there is appeal for open standard approaches. So if you put up those false barriers and say, well, you know what? I reduced the level of risk in investing here because I know that the IP is not going to be held hostage by any country or company or the decisions behind that IP are not going to be held by one company alone. You have that freedom and you have that additional flexibility that unleashes more investment on the open standard approach. I mean, the investment in Ethernet connected solutions, you know, went off the charts, right? So that picks up the forecast. I see on my notes here, risk five device shipments will reach 27 billion by 2027. Benchmarks are doing great. You got good developer traction, good VC investment, you got an ecosystem. What's the driver behind that number? What's the real tailwind that you guys are taking advantage of right now? Yeah, so it's a couple of things. More demand for processing in places where it started growing and now is exploding. Like look at automotive. We're projected to be 10% or more of the automotive electronics by 2025. You see that going on across industries. You see new types of workloads like AI that are really kind of sinking their teeth in at a custom processing level because that takes massive computing power. You know, the large learning models and other inference and generative AI requires a lot of compute power. And to get to that, you start to get very deep into custom processing. Do you have a concentration? Not, I wouldn't call it an issue, but is there a concentration of companies that are really adopting it? Like you said, automotive. And that makes a lot of sense because especially as the move towards EVs and things of that nature, and they want to control more of their destiny. Even the operating systems that are going into the cars, they're trying to be more open about what they're doing. Is that, do you see that as verticalized concentrations with those types of companies? We have some of that, right? And so data centers and hyperscales and HPC, they kind of are grouping together and kind of doing things that are symbiotic or synergistic to one another. You also continue to see that in consumer devices, in mobile. Qualcomm, 650 million cores shipped last year, right? I mean, that's a testament to a strategic shift that says, you know what, we are no longer going to just tie our wagon to one architecture, but taking a hybrid approach or taking a dramatic shift to something where they have that level of control. Clis, you mentioned Ethernet. So I have to ask, and got processing power obviously in the RISC-5, is there an Ethernet aspect to RISC-5? Because you see it comes like Broadcom. We see a lot of edge processing and networking in mobile and in some of the 5G and some of the control, yeah. Yeah, we see a lot of that activity going on. Are you partnered with Broadcom or how do you? We haven't had a huge engagement with Broadcom, but you know, many are working on things with RISC-5, you know, just back in the home shop. I heard Amazon's got a Broadcom alternative to the point of licensing. Right, right. I mean, this is part of that proprietary. So those large companies that have massive buying power are looking at alternatives. Every hyperscale that I've ever worked with over the last 15 years has always had additional options. What's our plan B that they're working on in the R&D part? We're going to always check up the license at any time. And then when you look at, you know, like the European Union, a lot of that R&D gets consolidated into other organizations or into, you know, EU funded activities and that type of thing happens around the world with other governments as well. Close to thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. Give you the final last minute. Put a plug in for RISC-5. What events are coming up? What are you guys looking to do? What's on your agenda? What are some of your goals? So the most important thing to do with RISC-5 is actually join the community. I promise you will get more than your dollar figure out of that relationship. We are amplifying the stories of our members constantly. That momentum and that scale is something to hitch onto. Second thing about joining in, that's where talent is cultivated and that's where you have the strategic insight to drive your own companies forward. So joining on as a member is really critical. We are at a phase in our lifespan where that engagement is driving where we go next. Second, we're going to have a RISC-5 summit in Europe in Barcelona in the second week of June, June 5th through the 9th. That would be a tremendous time to get out and meet with the community, engage in the technical as well as industry momentum that we're seeing. So those would be a couple of things that I would talk about. And then lastly, if you're looking for training and certification, we've just launched our first RISC-5 certification exam and have supporting courses now to go with that. Cluster, thanks for coming on. Cluster Redmond, CEO of RISC-5 International. Very prolific in the instruction set. Got a great ecosystem booming. Hitting an inflection point as open standards will drive innovation. This is theCUBE with all the coverage here. Help us start summit. We'll be right back after this short break.