[HN Gopher] Alibaba Cloud gets more of Android working on RISC-V...
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Alibaba Cloud gets more of Android working on RISC-V silicon
Author : rguiscard
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-04-27 06:12 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| akmittal wrote:
| Related: India govt planning to launch RISC-V processor by 2023
| https://swarajyamag.com/tech/modi-govt-launches-digital-indi...
| humanwhosits wrote:
| This is a pretty big deal for all the other companies working on
| RISC-V too, raises all the boats
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Mostly, I'm surprised that Google isn't the one leading the
| charge here. Although it's kind of cool from an ecosystem
| perspective to see somebody else moving things forward.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| They might be worried that it would fragment their app store,
| as plenty of apps use native ARM code
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Android used to support MIPS and x86_64 - in fact I _think_
| it still supports the latter. Of course, that might just
| mean that Google is painfully aware of how annoying that is
| to handle:)
| tadfisher wrote:
| They do, as well as x86 (32-bit); they are targets for
| emulator system images.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Is Google using ARM for their custom TPU systems? Perhaps
| they have some sort of non-compete agreement with ARM
| saagarjha wrote:
| TPUs are custom ASICs.
| Phurist wrote:
| x86 is dead, long live ...
| xvilka wrote:
| Looking forward to RISC-V machines in Travis CI or other
| services.
| fithisux wrote:
| And a set of GPU instructions are on the horizon. Yay!
| wmertens wrote:
| This is so cool - I'd like an open source CPU in my next phone
| please!
|
| (Of course, I would also like it to be fast, so that will
| probably not happen in the next 5 years)
|
| The article doesn't say if their port is also open source.
| There's a blog post here but I don't see any patches.
| https://riscv.org/blog/2021/11/how-alibaba-is-porting-risc-v...
| shakna wrote:
| I think this [0] is their Android port. You'll also find four
| RISC-V cores under that account that Alibaba open sourced near
| the end of last year.
|
| [0] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/riscv-aosp
| Narishma wrote:
| > I'd like an open source CPU in my next phone please!
|
| Just because it's RISC-V doesn't mean the CPU is open source.
| usrn wrote:
| Yeah. It's not licensed under the GPL or anything like that.
| I'm not sure it's as good as people seem to think.
| monocasa wrote:
| AliBaba has been open sourcing their designs though. AFAIK,
| this work is mainly against their XuanTie C910 cores that
| have the source published here: https://github.com/T-head-
| Semi/openc910
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not all RISC-V ends up open, but it has better odds than
| anything else.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| A large organization like Alibaba spending the effort to get
| Android running on their own RISC-V platform seems like a clear
| sign that we're on the cusp of seeing RISC-V development and
| adoption snowball in the next few years.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I sure hope so. I think we may be on the cusp of a renaissance
| in the CPU space. Intel UCIe, RISC-V, ARM, etc, have all been
| quite exciting lately.
|
| I'm an optimist so I imagine buying made to order CPUs from
| Intel or TSMC where you can pick and choose features and
| chiplets that can come from any number of companies.
| not2b wrote:
| The problem with your "mix and match" idea is that it's
| hugely expense to create masks for chip design, even for
| chips that simple compositions of predesigned cores, memory,
| and interconnect, and that expense only pays off because the
| one mask is used to fabricate anywhere from tens of thousands
| to millions of chips. A custom choice just for you would be
| very pricy.
|
| We already live in a world where chip designers pick and
| choose cores and components from any number of companies:
| processors we all know about, but things like USB3, HDMI,
| Bluetooth, and many others are often licensed from third
| parties. But for the numbers to work you've got to make lots
| of chips to handle the fixed costs.
| monocasa wrote:
| Does anyone have a decent break down of the cost of masks?
| I've never really gotten a good sense of what's actually
| COGS of the actual mask set, and how much is NRE costs
| that's subject to disruption if chip making is commoditized
| as we get further up the s-curve that is Moore's Law.
| not2b wrote:
| While it isn't directly applicable, here's a decent
| analysis of the costs of doing a custom ASIC to replace
| generic components, should provide an idea.
|
| https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-
| revol...
| not2b wrote:
| ugh, typos: "hugely expensive", "even for chips that are
| simple compositions".
| usrn wrote:
| We've had free CPU designs before: 8051 and MIPS. I think
| RISC-V popularity will just lead to less compatibility.
| monocasa wrote:
| Neither of those were free designs.
|
| 8051s are heavily cloned, but it's not like there's heavily
| used HDL floating around for free. Additionally the gate
| count niche of an 8051 is rather constrained.
|
| MIPS made a big deal about being open, but at the end of
| the day that seemed to just mean that they put their sales
| contacts on the main page. 'Open' in that case meant 'open
| access for our business partners to make RTL changes with
| the right signed contract'.
| mhh__ wrote:
| We the consumer will probably never do that but in industry
| that's been the case for a while. It's a SoC game not a CPU
| game anymore.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Could someone elaborate a bit on how RISC-V relates to ARM?
|
| From what I understand the former is a completely open source
| spec, and ARM is a proprietary one. But both are just specs,
| right? It's not as if I can buy a RISC-V CPU from an
| organization behind it, it'll have to be from a manufacturer
| that produces their own RISC CPUs?
|
| Is it also an entirely different instruction set? How does it
| compare to x86 and ARM in terms of performance?
|
| Last but not least, other than it being free / opensource, what
| are some of the reasons why anyone would choose RISC? Phrased
| differently, if they are going to take marketshare in the CPU
| world in the next decade, what will be the reason?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| take my comment with a bag full of sand, i am no expert,
| still
|
| when you talk about ARM, you have to license designs from the
| ARM, inc. Apple with its apple silicon is licensing from ARM
| the designs and IP from them.
|
| with RISC-v, there is no company to hold you hostage for
| designs and all. its all open source so you can build your
| own chip, own design, own tech, everything.
|
| this also means i assume that in the long run, if RISC-v and
| ARM are on equal footing, RISC-v would be more freer, cheaper
| because there is no licensing and other corporate stuff to go
| through like with ARM, inc
| goodpoint wrote:
| > with RISC-v, there is no company to hold you hostage for
| designs and all
|
| No no no. The RISC-V ISA is open.
|
| The implementation of RISC-V CPUs is often proprietary.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| OK. So can't there be multiple competing implementations?
| Proprietary but some like those university projects, Foss
| ?
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, the spec is free with a permissive license, and
| individual implementations are expanding to fill the full
| gamut of free to proprietary.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| How to prevent e.g. Alibaba from embrace-extend-
| extinguishing RISC-V? It seems so obvies that this will
| happen in one way or another
| snvzz wrote:
| Upstream toolchains won't readily accept extensions that
| aren't part of the standard, and maintaining forks is
| costly.
|
| There is no incentive not to get extensions standardized.
| In the first place, what's even missing in RISC-V? As of
| December's 15 extensions, it is pretty much there
| already, in terms of functionality.
| f0xJtpvHYTVQ88B wrote:
| ARM does develop their own core designs which they license
| to many companies. However, they have several different
| licenses available which range from using ARM's designs,
| tweaking ARM's designs, up to the Architectural license
| which allows companies to develop their own ARM ISA
| compatible cores own their own. Apple is one of the
| companies which has an Architectural license. The current
| cores used by Apple were designed by Apple and not based on
| designs from ARM.
| jchw wrote:
| Nit: you shouldn't use RISC as a shorthand for RISC-V. The
| former is a well-known term.
|
| Yes, RISC-V is an open ISA, yes, like ARM there is no fab
| making canonical RISC-V chips. It does at least have the
| benefit of having support in the UEFI spec pretty much right
| out of the gate, which offers a standard boot path of sorts
| (Arm64 also supports UEFI, but most devices to this day have
| their own bespoke boot firmware and protocols, AFAIK. The
| unifying factor tends to be something like uboot, again,
| AFAIK.) but it also has more flexibility, which has the
| knock-on effect that it may be harder to know which RISC-V
| software can run on which RISC-V hardware.
|
| I'm very curious to see where it goes. As a tinkerer I
| definitely have been looking for entire desktop computers
| that, weak or not, are truly open source and documented from
| the ground up. RISC-V platforms don't solve that entirely (in
| fact it's probably the remainder of SoC IP that poses the
| biggest problems) but it does offer an interesting option for
| a CPU.
| monocasa wrote:
| The spec is free, and a lot of cores are free as well. Here's
| the HDL for AliBaba's cores they've been developing this
| against: https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910
|
| There are also non-free RISC-V cores, but they essentially
| have to continuously make the argument for their existence
| against the free cores that are available (support,
| verification resources, just being better designs in the
| short term, already being hardened for proprietary process
| nodes, etc.)
| imtringued wrote:
| >Is it also an entirely different instruction set? How does
| it compare to x86 and ARM in terms of performance?
|
| It's a bit of a mixed bag. I'd say if macro op fusion turns
| out to be viable, it can become the fastest of the three, if
| not, it will be somewhere between ARM and x86 due to its
| unique compression scheme. This obviously depends on your
| particular chip. Apple is way ahead of Qualcomm on the same
| ISA.
| snvzz wrote:
| >macro op fusion turns out to be viable
|
| Macro-op fusion predates RISC-V.
|
| What's new is that RISC-V has been designed with knowledge
| of Macro-op fusion, which gave it some opportunities.
|
| I'd say it weights very little overall; RISC-V is very
| clever, irrespective of fusion.
| mhh__ wrote:
| RISC-V is a nice clean design but ARM is also a fairly clean
| but less nice design, by people who have their face on the
| grindstone 24/7.
|
| Winning is likely to be a question of luck (a la Unix
| perhaps) and implementation quality.
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