This article is part of the Innovators 2023 issue.
Calista Redmond, the CEO of RISC-V International, has a mission to expand and engage RISC-V stakeholders, compel industry adoption, and increase visibility and opportunity for RISC-V within and beyond the organization. RISC-V adoption has accelerated across domains, from embedded to enterprise, from automotive to high-performance computing (HPC).
More than 10 billion RISC-V cores are already in market, and analysts predict nearly 80 billion cores by 2025. This RISC-V CPU core market has a 114.9% CAGR, capturing >14% of all CPU cores by 2025—arguably the fastest adoption curve of any open ISA in history.
Calista leads the community of engineers and executives to proliferate adoption via technical collaboration and upstream of open deliverables to the broader industry of software and other stakeholders. Key elements of RISC-V now make it the best processor for general and custom computing due to its inherent sustainable and efficiency advantages of modular design from a clean base ISA. Extensions are designed simply, for easy implementation.
The clean base ISA doesn't carry legacy baggage while the modular design enables implementers to include only appropriate extensions for their solution. In addition, there's reserved encoding space for alternative extensions without disrupting the base ISA/requiring a new ISA.
The results are already evident as more performance benchmarks are published.
Growing the strongest ecosystem is paramount to success. RISC-V is instrumented with software top of mind. We are leading RISC-V as an open standard to enable software choice and applications that are keen to run on RISC-V. This extends and includes toolchain and OS support for standard extension ratification, support of a single hypervisor standard to simplify and unify application support, and engagement of thousands of software developers bringing workloads to RISC-V as a strategic imperative, with deep investment by the commercial sector and across geographies.
Taking a collaborative, standards-based approach has proven to prevent fragmentation. Stakeholders realize the incredible return achieved through collective investment in a shared approach rather than the burden of a single proprietary interest in driving for scale. RISC-V also is leading this through the proliferation of ISA profiles to provide packages of ISA extensions for a given domain.
Prior to RISC-V International, Calista held a variety of roles at IBM, including Vice President of IBM Z Ecosystem, where she led strategic relationships across software vendors, system integrators, business partners, developer communities, and broader engagement across the industry. Prior to IBM, she was an entrepreneur in four successful startups in the IT industry. Calista holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.
Read more articles in the Innovators 2022 issue.
