All the other major FPGA manufacturers already started offering an official supported RISC-V core as an alternative to their proprietary ISA cores a few years ago. Of course people also use 3rd party cores off github, but supported and integrated into the IDE and other tools means something to a lot of customers.

MicroSemi have been offering RISC-V soft cores since 2017 and hard cores (PolarFire SoC, in e.g. the new BeagleBoard Fire, Icicle) since late 2020.

Lattice announced their first official RISC-V soft core in I think June 2020 (collab with SiFive announced December 2019), and improved versions e.g. an 800 LUT core in mid 2021.

Intel introduced Nios V in October 2021.

Microblaze was in the gate count that is being actively decimated by RISC-V. Just like tensilica, arc, etc. have lost most their value add in the space. Having personally ported a kernel to microblaze, it's basically a halfway point between MIPS and SH4, classic pipelined RISC in the ~20k gate range.

Probably the most interesting part of this announcement is that they're so in that they're straightup redefining their trademarked term "Microblaze" rather than making a new term and continuing to support classic Microblaze updates.

Back in the day, SiFive had a RV32 core that could fit in an Artix-7 that was pretty bare-bones. IO was random, it couldn't use the onboard DRAM, etc. It would be cool to see an officially supported RV32 softcore on an Artix-7. I had reasonably good experiences with the MicroBlaze back in the day, but would never think of using it for anything other than testing or education 'cause it was (very) closed source. And while I'm not the worlds biggest RISC-V cheerleader, this is the kind of thing that it's good at: "here's a tool that uses an ISA you may have already invested in. also, we're not going to try to lock you in to THAT side of the toolchain." I'm somewhat okay with AMD/Xilinx locking you in to whatever is underneath the ISA since you're probably going to have to pay for hardware somehow: either buying the FPGA or buying a catalog part (if they ever emerge.)

Also... thx for pointing out AMD bought Xilinx. I had completely forgotten about it and was mildly surprised to see AMD adopting MicroBlaze.

Xilinx is a pretty big FPGA manufacturer and Microblaze offers a nice selection of fault tolerance features, including TMR. TMR on RISC-V is not novel here, but it does mean the large number of projects already using Microblaze, and new ones that want to use Microblaze, can now use RISC-V.

It’s a microcontroller that can also function as a real-time CPU. RISC-V is already quite popular in that market.