Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence core part of the Alibaba Group, announced it is making further progress in the porting of the basic Android functions to the RISC V instruction set architecture (ISA). This confirms the practicality of using RISCV-based Android devices for multimedia and artificial intelligence.

In the past year, the company claimed to have successfully ported some functions such as chrome browsing to Android 10. Following the first porting test more effort has been made to update the previous design to Android 12 to enable third-party vendor modules to enable new functionslike playback of video and audio, WiFi and Bluetooth, along with camera operations.

To facilitate these new capabilities, Alibaba Cloud has also added more enhancements to the system like tools, core sets of tools, third-party libraries, and SoC board support packages for RISC-V and further enhancing the reliability and stability of the RISC-V ecosystem running using Google’s Android software stack.

Alibaba Cloud’s RISCV-based processors have been used widely in a variety of applications such as smart automobiles, home appliances and even edge computing. About a year ago, Alibaba Cloud opened the source code for the XuanTie IP Core line to allow designers to use the code on Github as well as the Open Chip Community in order to create prototype chips on their own that can be customized to suit IoT applications like gateways, networking, as well as edge server.