[HN Gopher] Intel to Create RISC-V Dev Platform with SiFive P550...
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Intel to Create RISC-V Dev Platform with SiFive P550 Cores on 7nm
in 2022
Author : rbanffy
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-06-25 09:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| fvv wrote:
| Small chips.. I'm wondering about 7nm yield issue at Intel...
| taffronaut wrote:
| Generally for Intel I see the benefits as:
|
| - Part of a roadmap to RISC-V to eventually lure Arm customers
| uncomfortable with the Nvidia bid for Arm
|
| - Generally hitting Arm at the lower end by giving RISC-V more
| credibility in the short term
|
| - Open technology like RISC-V is less affected by the US rules
| for technology discussion/transfer with China
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Open technology like RISC-V is less affected by the US rules
| for technology discussion/transfer with China
|
| I understand people see that as a benefit of RISC-V, but I'm
| not seeing it quite here; how does that benefit Intel?
| [deleted]
| bnt wrote:
| They might get approval to continue selling to China
| (companies on the export ban list)?
| ksec wrote:
| Previous Discussions
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27592187
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27591218
| b0tzzzzzzman wrote:
| Does it come with out of band managment systems? I have a
| difficult time seeing how Intel will benefit this outside of the
| chip Fab process. Granted this is substantially a branch in a
| different direction.. I expect very little for non NDA customers
| on their side.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Maybe to have an out of the coming death of x86 that's not ARM,
| which could potentially be controlled by Nvidia soon
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I thought the uk blocked the sale on national security
| grounds.
|
| What is the compelling reason for going for RISC V compared
| to ARM or x86 when comes to general purpose computing?
|
| I understand Intel wants to communicate that it is taking a
| direction but it seems to me that we are a long time away
| from seeing RISC V as the main computing architecture in a
| consumer laptop or a phone.
| brucehoult wrote:
| ARM is potentially soon owned by an enemy. RISC-V is owned
| by no one.
|
| Arm64 and riscv64 are pretty close to equivalent in a
| technical sense for general purpose computing, especially
| once consumer ARM chips ship with SVE2 and RISC-V with
| their Vector extension (which are both going to be out at
| pretty much the same time).
|
| Someone with a lot of money, such as Intel, investing in
| RISC-V will vastly accelerate RISC-V getting to being able
| to be used in a high end phone or laptop. Intel has the
| ability to "do an M1" with RISC-V, leapfrogging ARM.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > Intel has the ability to "do an M1" with RISC-V,
| leapfrogging ARM.
|
| What about Intel's execution over the last 5+ years gives
| you this confidence?
| rollcat wrote:
| > Intel has the ability to "do an M1"
|
| They might be able to match it on speed, efficiency, and
| price, but not on vertical integration. But I'm curious
| to see how a RISC-V ecosystem might develop once someone
| starts pumping heavy dollars into it.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Who has the incentive to put heavy dollars into it?
| helloguillecl wrote:
| The manufacturer with the US government behind (plus
| political support), since they don't want to see their
| country lagging behind in processor manufacturing for
| strategic reasons.
|
| I believe this will tend to put the right incentives when
| needed.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Nationalism and subsidies does not make a sustainable
| business.
|
| Why would intel do something that breaks x86/windows
| dominance? Why would Google/Qualcomm break arm/android?
| dragonelite wrote:
| Its not that they want but politics might drive them
| toward this way.
|
| I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese big tech are willing to
| invest in semi conductor designs to keep more of the
| profit internally then send it to the US and prevent risk
| in their supply chains. You also see more and more
| Chinese big tech companies branch out of China so its not
| certain that windows and android can easily keep their
| monopoly.
| relativ575 wrote:
| > Nationalism and subsidies does not make a sustainable
| business.
|
| This is not true. Airbus is an early example, and of
| course we can't forget to mention Huawei, Baidu or
| Alibaba.
|
| I'd say defense industry as well, but since their
| customers are governments one may argue that their
| revenue would dry up when military spending is down
| speed_spread wrote:
| How fast do you believe Intel could come up with such an
| M1-level RISC-V CPU?
|
| Doing so, wouldn't they also help create a market where
| the barrier to entry is much lower than x86, thus
| inviting more competitors than they have now? It'd be
| interesting to see Intel on such a warpath against ARM...
| AmVess wrote:
| Intel won't be able to do an M1 style SOC any time soon.
| Not with any architecture.
|
| Also, why would this lower the barrier to entry? Intel
| loves their margins. This will never change.
|
| This effort is all about Intel fiddling with their 7nm
| process, not about moving to another architecture.
| joshsyn wrote:
| same kind of news over and over again, with nothing to show for.
| bullen wrote:
| I would say Atom is Intels best bet at a ARM competitor, not at
| the same power but as a slightly beefier alternative.
|
| From what I read they are canceling that line and instead
| offering low power regular desktop processors.
|
| That's why I bought 4x 8-core Atom servers at 25W, so I don't get
| GPUs in my low electricity servers / high performance alternative
| to Raspberry 4.
|
| RISC-V is probably going to take a decade to reach the kind of
| stability the latest Atom line has in terms of support and
| performance, if ever; specially on the server-side.
|
| The Xeon line CPUs consume way too much power to be an
| alternative for home hosting with lead-acid backup.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Atom is an amazingly power inefficient design.
|
| X86 here is a definite dead weight on its neck. Atoms front-end
| if few times bigger than the back-end.
| minipci1321 wrote:
| Somehow I doubt this wide-sweeping affirmation, are you sure?
| Atom is really big family by now, starting from Silvermont it
| vent full out of order with all bells and whistles, I find it
| hard to believe OO backend is anywhere near the size of x86
| insn decoder.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A complicated ISA like the x86, with layer upon layer of
| additions, costs a lot of silicon that will need power to
| run.
| minipci1321 wrote:
| Let's go see some figures!
|
| "Empirical Study of Power Consumption of x86-64
| Instruction Decoder"
|
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/c
| ool...
|
| From the conclusion:
|
| "The result demonstrates that the decoders consume
| between 3% and 10% of the total processor package power
| in our benchmarks. The power consumed by the decoders is
| small compared with other components such as the L2
| cache, which consumed 22% of package power in benchmark
| #1. We conclude that switching to a different instruction
| set would save only a small amount of power since the
| instruction decoder cannot be eliminated completely in
| modern processors."
| baybal2 wrote:
| 1. They are physically huge, and that means more leakage,
| when there could be none.
|
| 2. Inefficient front-end taking toll on everything behind
| it contributes to the rest of the chip doing nothing
| except dissipating power.
|
| 3. While cores on modern SoCs take much less space than
| everything else usually, front-ends still eat into the
| die area.
|
| 4. Front-end dictates how the rest of the core behind it
| is designed. I believe that X86 technical debt absolutely
| must exert its toll on that, and overall transistor count
| in the back-end.
| api wrote:
| Scaling RISC-V will be orders of magnitude easier than anything
| of the X86 lineage. It's a new clean modern design with so much
| less complexity and legacy baggage. Intel could build crazy
| fast RISC-V designs within a few years at most if they want to.
|
| A very interesting path back to relevance for Intel would be to
| design proprietary absolutely crazy fast RISC-V cores and
| market them in the data center and HPC markets first. The
| tooling on Linux is about there. Eventually they could get an
| initially small but very loyal developer laptop market going
| too. A good RISC-V design could easily compete with the Apple
| M1.
|
| Get enough momentum and a Windows port could happen. Then you
| could reboot the PC market.
|
| The automotive and drone niches would be interesting too. There
| is a market there for low power high performance chips for
| things like driving assist and autonomy. A new instruction set
| wouldn't matter much since the whole software stack is more or
| less custom anyway.
|
| At the very least it would be a way to hedge in case X86 really
| does start to enter a death spiral.
| postalrat wrote:
| If it's so easy to create fast risc-v cores then why hasn't
| it been done?
| api wrote:
| Nobody's done it yet, probably due to lack of perceived
| demand.
|
| Don't get me wrong. It's not so easy that a few college
| kids could just whip one out. A company like Intel or AMD
| could definitely do it.
| hughrr wrote:
| Which servers/boards did you buy. I'm interested in one for
| local dev work as over a year it's probably cheaper than
| renting a suitably large VM.
| bullen wrote:
| SuperMicro
| hughrr wrote:
| Thanks will look into it.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > That's why I bought 4x 8-core Atom servers at 25W, so I don't
| get GPUs in my low electricity servers / high performance
| alternative to Raspberry 4.
|
| How much did you pay? Last time I checked these were still a
| couple of times more expensive than Raspberry Pis.
| bullen wrote:
| ~$500 per board, but then you need to add PicoPSU, passively
| cooled case, SATA drive, 12V PSU, 2x 16GB RAM, so about $1100
| in total
|
| Same Gflops/W but about 4x Watt so for things that cannot be
| distributed (like a shared MMO world in my case) it's
| probably as good as it gets...
| rbanffy wrote:
| Those boards have proprietary formats. Are you running them
| in supermicro chassis?
| bullen wrote:
| A2SDi-8C-HLN4F are Mini-ITX so they fit in these:
| https://streacom.com/products/db1-fanless-mini-itx-case/
|
| But you need to buy this GPU adapter:
| https://streacom.com/products/db4-gpu-cooling-kit/ (for
| the small CPU)
|
| And buy M3 female-female spacers that are 50mm long and
| some M3 thread that you cut at the appropriate length.
|
| So it's a bit fiddly until they release proper small CPU
| adapters for these.
|
| Also to remove the heatsink that comes on the motherboard
| you need to run the board without fan until it heats
| enough to soften the heatpaste. Be careful to not rip the
| board when removing it, wooden icecream stick to bend
| might come useful.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Intel didn't so much kill the atom line as merge and evolve it.
|
| They are following in ARM's footsteps by having heterogeneous
| multi-core CPUs with high performance and low power cores (like
| the M1 and ARM's big.little before that)
|
| Intel's Adler Lake will have a mix of Golden Cove cores for
| performance and Gracemont cores for power efficiency. Gracemont
| cores are improved Tremont cores previously found in their Atom
| line.
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| I wonder whether we will sometime see RISC-V as a "replacement"
| (Either official by Intel/AMD or unofficial because of being
| better) on desktop PCs.
| rijoja wrote:
| Why not. On the server side of things the architecture doesn't
| really matter as recompiling isn't that big of a deal. For
| linux it is no issue whatsoever, Windows has technically been
| multiarch for decades really and it seems MS wants that to
| happen. Also apple showed that static recompliation is an
| viable option as well quite recently.
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