[HN Gopher] Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V
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Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V
Author : tomclancy
Score : 172 points
Date : 2022-08-26 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.allaboutcircuits.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.allaboutcircuits.com)
| kyaghmour wrote:
| There's so much more to a chip than its ISA. I'm not sure how the
| ISA changes anything. If I design a board around an STM32, for
| instance, even within that family I'd have to find a chip that
| has the same exact footprint to be able to replace one that I
| couldn't find. And even then, I'd like have to reconfigure the
| software ...
|
| So unless there was a pin-for-pin/electrical standard for chips,
| the ISA is of no effect.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| I suspect most of RISC-V development is more towards moving away
| from western controlled ISA's that can be sanctioned for any
| reason. Points about avoid shortages from any fab being allowed
| to fabricate RISC-V CPUs is just the "cherry on top".
| tyingq wrote:
| Western Digital was probably more excited about the no-
| royalties model.
| fakeslimshady wrote:
| mrweasel wrote:
| I doubt that countries like Iran, North Korean and now Russia
| care much about the legality of implementing a ARM processor
| without a license. Or did you mean more in terms of a chip that
| can be sold to those countries without risk? In that case you
| just sacrion the sale of the equipment required to make the
| chip, or block the manufacturer from your markets.
| conradev wrote:
| I don't know if sanctions are the reason, but moving away from
| foreign-controlled IP is certainly a thing. Chinese companies
| make STM32 clones (even fixing the errata in the original):
|
| https://hackaday.com/2020/10/22/stm32-clones-the-good-the-ba...
| justahuman74 wrote:
| I think it's more about a potential future usage of ARM in a
| sanctions package. Somewhat similar to how Hauwai was was hit
| with a list of narrow prohibitions like access to the android
| store.
|
| Having an openly implementable ISA is just one less thing to
| worry about
| oneplane wrote:
| I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete
| copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP
| under their rebranded name.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The stolen architectures cannot be legitimately sold
| outside of China, due to patents held by ARM ltd. RISC-V
| avoids these headaches.
| oneplane wrote:
| Indeed, but conversely, China will have access to ARM no
| matter what. This also means that we can sanction all we
| want, they locally have the fabs and IP to create ARM,
| RISC-V, MIPS and even x86 CPUs (and they are already
| doing all of that). Granted, their fabs can't do top-of-
| the-line lithography (yet?) but since they have already
| created 64-core ARM server CPUs and some custom AI
| silicon they can get horizontally scaled performance
| regardless. This is of course their focus: make sure they
| can make computers and related equipment domestically no
| matter what.
| snvzz wrote:
| They do have access to ARM, sure. But they also have
| access to RISC-V, which is technically superior and free
| of the troubles associated with ARM.
| barkingcat wrote:
| FWIW it most likely doesn't matter if they can't be sold
| outside of China. the domestic market is large enough.
| hajile wrote:
| Does anyone outside of China want Chinese spy chips
| regardless of architecture?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Why do you call them "spy" chips? Have they been found to
| generally have backdoors?
|
| In an embedded context, a lot of that doesn't matter
| either way - your dumb coffee maker doesn't have a lot of
| opportunity to spy on you anyway. Smart devices are a
| very different story. However, Chinese embedded chips are
| often very cheap for the capabilities.
| nivenkos wrote:
| And all Intel and AMD processors have "spy" capabilities
| too with the built-in black-box Intel Management Engine
| and AMD Platform Security Processor. And it's only
| becoming more powerful and commonplace with remote
| attestation and Microsoft Pluton. In a few years PCs
| might become just like mobile phones - the bootloader
| locked down requiring signed images from Microsoft, etc.
|
| Given all of that, China seems like a great option if
| they produce RISC-V processors.
| bb88 wrote:
| If they produce "spy" risc-v processors, no.
|
| State sponsored extortion is still a thing.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Tons of hobbyists buy PINE hardware. All of their SoCs
| are Chinese (Rockchip, Allwinner). Hardkernel/Odroid
| stuff is a mix of Amlogic, Intel, and Rockchip.
|
| Outside the hobbyist space people do seem to be shunning
| Chinese SoCs AFAICT. Maybe no name TV boxes have
| rockchips, but other than that not much.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Aren't the countries that would care about the legalities
| and patents the same countries that would be sanctioning
| them? I don't know who will adopt risc-v for high
| performance. Nvidia maybe? Intel-lattice-altera-intelgpu.
| Amd-ati-xilinx. Nvidia wanted to be nvidia-arm but as
| that didn't work, maybe risc-v? No big fpga players for
| them to pick up though.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Arm China majority shareholders announce the company's
| corporate governance issue has been resolved
|
| https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/04/arm-china-
| majority-...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yes, that resolution has occurred in favor of the CCP.
| ARM Ltd folded. The person who controls the corporate
| seals is a CCP apparatchik.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Remember this is a joint venture with 51% Chinese
| ownership. Meaning of course the Chinese have the final
| word.
| sangnoir wrote:
| ...but my fiduciary duty compels me to maximize short-
| term profits for my shareholders </s>
| oneplane wrote:
| Unless they actually get the company seal and remove the
| armed guards and gain control of the building, it's all
| just PR. On top of that, even then there is nothing to
| prevent this from happening again, and anything that
| already has been copied or 'exported' really isn't going
| back into the box of company secrets.
| anfilt wrote:
| This one I am really torn on. On one hand I really like
| that RISC-V is open. However, on the other hand I do not
| like the idea of it being used to avoid sanctions. The
| problem is an ISA that can be sanctioned is not truly open.
|
| The two desires are definitely at odds with each other.
| Like the RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland to avoid
| the possibility in 2019. So the foundation is definitely
| trying to keep things more open.
|
| At the end of the day it's just ISA and not a micro-
| architecture design or set of cell libraries and fab
| processes. So it's not a complete bypass of all possible
| sanctions. ARM for instance does provide designs and not
| just an ISA.
|
| The main problem is that a chip made in a sanctioned
| country with RISC-V can still would have value outside the
| sanctioned entity unlike some organically developed or a
| chip made without legally licensing some-other ISA. So
| sanctioned entity could easily make the chips and then make
| them look like they are made elsewhere or by someone else
| and still have something to sell the wider world.
| mjevans wrote:
| Speaking a common language is a good thing. This is no
| more difficult than a sanction on something already
| common like food crops.
| snvzz wrote:
| Gigadevices GD32 has a successor in GD32V, which is the same
| but RISC-V based.
| packetlost wrote:
| Maybe. It's not like sanctioned countries tend give a shit
| about copyright law, so how would sanctions prevent the use of
| something they already know how to make and use? I'm just not
| convinced this idea holds any water.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| Not breaking copyright makes it easier for a eastern block to
| form around RISC-V fabrication.
| spamizbad wrote:
| If you're manufacturing chips under sanctions your most
| difficult finds are going to be the manufacturing equipment,
| expertise, and raw materials to produce the chips. It's not
| going to be an ISA - there have been a litany of "open" ISAs
| and well-documented industry standard ones you're likely going
| to do unlicensed copies of.
|
| Secondary challenge here, going beyond the ISA, are pre-defined
| blocks of functionality already implemented (eg: an ethernet
| controller, internal CPU busses, memory controllers, etc). Even
| in the RISC-V world many of these are commercial and require a
| license.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You want to have lots of software for your computer. Like
| Linux, Chromium, compilers, JIT, etc. It reduces the number
| of options.
| [deleted]
| notsapiensatall wrote:
| Most hardware is not field-programmable. You can't update a
| CPU's DDR3 PHY to DDR4, or switch to DDR3L if your needs
| change.
|
| The single-purpose nature of ASICs and hardware blocks is
| what makes them fast and power-efficient.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yes. The (commercial) interest in riscv comes from China and is
| driven by the us china tech war. The riscv foundation moved to
| Switzerland as a reaction to the initial round of Huawei
| sanctions.
|
| You will find Chinese companies at forefront of riscv
| development (ie Alibaba) and Huawei harmonyos supports riscv.
|
| I don't know why the article doesn't mention this aspect.
| Lind5 wrote:
| not just the chip shortage. The rise of RISC-V coincides with a
| couple of other events in the industry. The first is the slowing
| of Moore's Law, meaning that increases in total processing power
| no longer comes along with each new fabrication node. The second
| is the meteoric rise in machine learning, demanding massive
| increases in processing power. https://semiengineering.com/why-
| risc-v-is-succeeding/
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Language models and image generation make fun demos, but do we
| have transformative use cases that'll actually require large ML
| compute in the future ? Voice recognition and translation are
| the only ones that comes to mind, yet don't require that much
| power.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Hmm, Is there any discussion of how RISC-V designs could be
| incorporated into a GPU or TPU that could train deep learning
| systems? Your link doesn't say anything about that but it's an
| interesting question.
| mysterydip wrote:
| What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste
| motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be
| better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there
| that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?
| cptskippy wrote:
| You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb
| and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just
| GPUs and CPUs.
|
| Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of
| discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage
| regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip,
| rectification is a chip.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?
| tverbeure wrote:
| For many FPGAs, the cost of the additional power supply
| controllers will be more than the cost of a full
| microcontroller solution.
| crote wrote:
| Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use
| in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a
| EUR5000 SSL accelerator.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Not all Chips are digital logic. In fact most are not. An
| FPGA is reprogrammable logic. You can not replace a
| rectifier or regulator with an FPGA.
|
| That's kind of like suggesting someone use a stapler (not a
| staple) when they need a lag bolt because "well they're
| both steel".
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I feel like this could be reasonable for boutique production,
| but if you're dumpster diving it may be difficult to order
| millions of exactly the same part this way.
| fipar wrote:
| I think that's a good idea but then companies doing that
| wouldn't be able to sell their products as new, and we probably
| need a cultural shift before widespread adoption of refurbished
| and used products is doable.
|
| Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of
| things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it
| seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime
| of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties
| would be affected too.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently
| in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner
| rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick
| the can down the road.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| It may be more prudent for us to perfect our material
| extraction process to reuse these metals and plastics, as
| opposed to reusing the same piece of hardware. Once that is
| done, we could probably have e-cycling be picked up by
| trash collectors just like regular recycling.
| crote wrote:
| It depends.
|
| First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or
| CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing.
| They are highly specialized application-specific electronics,
| which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate,
| and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem,
| where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are
| designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily
| costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
|
| Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips -
| which have often been available for a decade or more. The
| applications they are being used in do not really require a lot
| of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable.
| We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was
| initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty
| of power for some obscure automotive module.
|
| Although recycling is _technically_ sort-of possible, it is
| extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and
| associated price hike, it isn 't really economically viable.
| Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you
| simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively
| testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to
| buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they
| dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known
| quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly.
|
| On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the
| other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be
| repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone
| and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw
| out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A
| skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and
| laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It
| is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be
| the the last resort - not the first.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away
| instead.
|
| A skilled technician replacing a 2C/ part on a $10 board
| costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that
| board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the
| board originally cost to manufacture.
|
| You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag
| controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can
| have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not
| only has more variable output but less accurate quality
| metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process
| controls.
|
| A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less
| reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient
| to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.
| stew-j wrote:
| Nice writeup, thanks.
|
| > It depends.
|
| I hardly ever give up a computer, we still have a '98 Windows
| laptop doing recipe duty in the kitchen. (It's getting harder
| to find a small 32 bit Linux distro these days, though.)
| Power usage is another concern, one machine I took to be
| "recycled" (I know maybe or maybe not) was a Mac G4 which was
| good as a space heater in the winter, but that's about it--
| and I didn't feel like moving it 1500 miles with our latest
| relocation.
|
| I started with electronics many years ago, and would balk at
| replacing a surface mount chip, but people could learn basic
| electronic repair literacy for things that commonly break
| like cords which would help a lot. I also don't tend to buy
| products like smart phones which are glued together and
| difficult to repair.
|
| As for RISC-V, it is hard to find even a dev board with the
| chip shortages (I bought a HiFive Inventor kit to experiment
| with as a first project):
|
| https://www.hifiveinventor.com/
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I am personally very excited for RISC-V. I like the boot process
| of OpenSBI/U-Boot, can also directly boot a Linux kernel. So far
| I have only used the qemu virt machine w/ riscv64 cpu. OpenBSD
| and Debian/Ubuntu have great support, I have ordered a VisionFive
| board, curious to see how well it runs on physical hardware
| tregoning wrote:
| "Yeah. RISC is good" ....
| https://twitter.com/Hackers_bot/status/1547829853231075331
| sremani wrote:
| Access to high purity quartz is the real bottle neck. You can
| have your own fabs and designs.. but if America and Russia refuse
| to sell you some Quartz.. you are out of luck!
|
| https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hi....
| xadhominemx wrote:
| High purity quartz is definitely not a bottleneck in the
| electronics industry.
| sremani wrote:
| May be you are right, but can you add some color and context
| to your commentary. Like a good article link etc.
|
| I am more than happy to chance my mind, if provided evidence.
| crote wrote:
| According to your linked article its main use is silicon
| crucibles - which are required to make the source material
| for ICs and solar panels.
|
| But solar panel prices continue to drop rapidly, and quite
| a few silicon-based semiconductors are still widely
| available at low prices.
|
| The chip shortage is a direct result of a covid-induced
| demand shift. Manufacturers of cars and consumer
| electronics seriously mispredicted consumer demand. The
| resulting mass-cancellation followed by mass-ordering
| resulted in a demand shockwave for mature microcontrollers,
| which manufacturers were unable to absorb with existing
| stock. Due to plant shutdowns and the general multi-month
| production time, immediate replenishment is not possible.
| The resulting shortages in turn made downstream
| manufacturers switch from JIT to hoarding, which made the
| problem even worse. Microcontroller manufacturers in turn
| aren't able to adjust supply because fabs are really
| difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to build.
|
| Nothing about this has anything to do with quartz.
| [deleted]
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Considering that quartz has a ton of limitations, MEMS and
| other digital oscillators are ready to step in the moment
| that quartz is cost prohibitive.
|
| We're already at a breaking point for low frequency quartz.
| You literally can't get it small enough for modern packages
| until you up the frequency. Find a 2x2mm 8Mhz part, I'll
| wait while you fail.
|
| We're JUST NOW starting to get standardization on SMD
| oscillators in common packages, and these packages have
| typically pin incompatible (an enable pin instead of a two
| pin pierce oscillator setup) but same footprint digital
| alternatives about.
|
| Maybe you read an article, but is incorrect to say we're
| being held up by quartz _availability_.
| crote wrote:
| Best I can do right now is TXC AV08000301, which is
| 3.2x2.5mm.
|
| I'm surprised you even need one like that. Most modern
| electronics to use clock dividers or multipliers anyways,
| especially once your chip is small enough that you need a
| 2x2mm xtal. Or they just have an internal low-accuracy
| oscillator. In my experience one of the plentiful 4-pin
| 2520 or 3225 ones usually does the job, and the market
| has done a decent job standardizing their footprint.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Isn't the clock generator a discrete component? Do modern CPUs
| and GPUs have integrated clocks?
| sremani wrote:
| I do not know -- but when I talk about High Quality Quartz, I
| am talking about the raw material that is needed to
| manufacture Silicon Wafers.
|
| https://www.waferworld.com/post/9-things-you-might-not-
| have-...
| cptskippy wrote:
| Ahh... I read another comment about alternative sources for
| clock signals and assumed the article was referring to the
| use of quartz crystals used in occillators.
| Reitet00 wrote:
| Very nice to see RISC-V growing like that and being in the area
| of interest by big names such as Google and Intel. Open solutions
| are critical for risk management but I wonder if desktop/server
| RISC-V processors are also planned.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are server specs but embedded was the initial priority. I
| don't think there's been a lot of attention paid to desktop
| which isn't a super interesting area in general although it
| could of course piggyback on server work from a spec
| perspective if anyone were actually interested in giving it a
| go.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What's the difference between desktop and embedded? I
| reverse-engineered some medical device. It houses tiny CPU
| and 3" touch screen. Inside it runs Linux with X Window,
| Chromium, Electron and software written with JS. It's
| definitely embedded device, it's tiny, works from
| accumulator, hand-held. But its software stack is not any
| different from desktop.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| For desktop you'd definitely want things like GPU and at
| least video decode. So that instantly makes it much more
| involved.
| notsapiensatall wrote:
| Traditionally, the main difference was a full-featured MMU
| which allows virtual address spaces.
|
| But these days, you have advanced 600MHz microcontrollers
| with simple GPUs, and full-featured CPUs which get used as
| an embedded platform. You can even build a Linux kernel for
| no-MMU platforms.
|
| It's a fuzzy line.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > super interesting area in general
|
| deterred by the size of the profits for the winners, and the
| losses for those who do not compete in global markets.. yet I
| suggest there are few things _more_ interesting than a
| personal, general purpose computer
| packetlost wrote:
| Without a company like Apple to put in the resources and
| engineering effort for something like Rosetta, there's really
| going to be next to no demand for a RISC-V based desktop
| computer outside of specialized development and maybe
| competing with ARM-based Chromebook-likes. Desktop systems
| are absolutely beholden to their platform and architecture
| because that's what determines which apps you can run. Any
| serious use of a desktop (that is not programming) basically
| needs to use Windows or Mac OS (think CAD, professional video
| editing, etc.) so you're not just convincing hardware
| manufacturers: you're convincing thousands of app vendors,
| and that's just not going to happen.
| cestith wrote:
| It's not the biggest subsegment of the desktop space, but
| there are a good number of people using Pi-level devices as
| a second desktop. RiscOS, Linux, NetBSD, and even Windows
| run on Raspberry Pi. Some of those run on several other
| similarly powered boards. In the open source space, plenty
| of apps already support AMD64, ARM32 and ARM64 and the
| distros distribute for them. If I can get Debian or Ubuntu
| on a system with even 1/10 the package repo of AMD64, it's
| worth considering for a cheap laptop or a small low-power
| desktop.
|
| Now I know that doesn't sound like much. Don't kid yourself
| into thinking Apple Silicon M1 and M2 came from nowhere,
| though. If it wasn't for growing capability in the ARM
| lines in other products Apple would not have been so likely
| to invest in it for their new technology, Rosetta or no.
| Exynos Chromebooks and such led the way to ARM Macbooks the
| same way the IBM PC led to displacing DEC and Sun
| workstations, then minicomputers, then x86 servers
| replacing most other servers in the DC.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I would imagine that "good number of people" are mostly
| Linux hobbyists, and from my personal experience most
| people use them as a tinkering or IOT device rather than
| a full-blown desktop due to the lack of performance. If
| you're mostly in the terminal that's fine, but for
| running complex web apps a used x86 would make more
| sense.
|
| I can definitely see that hobbyist market and future Pi-
| like devices moving to RISC-V, but I'm less certain about
| mainstream use unless Windows and Mac (or maybe even
| Android and ChromeOS) really decide to move over.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| "Good number of people" is many thousands, maybe even
| hundreds of thousands.
|
| And I know of 3 families that have pi based desktops at
| home, and use them as desktops. (One of those has a
| person that works in IT in it.) I don't know anybody that
| has "experimental desktops" that they use only to thinker
| with, AFAIK, when people assembly a desktop, it's because
| they want to use as a desktop.
| cestith wrote:
| The Archimedes was way slower than today's mainstream
| systems, too. The more applications a processor family
| gets, the more attention gets paid to making it
| performant.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| > Exynos Chromebooks and such led the way to ARM Macbooks
| the same way the IBM PC led to displacing DEC and Sun
| workstations
|
| I think chrome books had very little to do with it. A lot
| of the work had already happened with the PowerPC switch.
| On the processor front, Apple's arm processors aren't at
| all like exynos chips that use standard arm cores. I
| would say that the apple silicon macs are more influenced
| by iPhone and iPad success than anything else, especially
| since iOS already runs a lot of macOS
| cestith wrote:
| Apple wouldn't have used ARM for the iPhone and iPad if
| the cores hadn't been proven in other similar platforms.
| ARM goes back a long time. My Psion palmtops have ARM
| cores. Many of the WinCE systems have ARM cores. The ARM
| processors in fact go back to 1985, with the ARM
| Development System for the BBC Micro and then the
| Archimedes in 1987.
|
| There's a whole world of ARM processors out there. The
| ISA, packaging, software, and expertise around it
| everywhere in the world helps make that ecosystem
| stronger. Before ARM there was Intel, and before Intel
| was PowerPC, yet even before that there were the 68000
| series Macs. And before the Mac, there were the 65816 in
| the IIgs and the 6502 in the Apple II. Don't be surprised
| if Apple is an early adopter of RISC-V for support
| processors. If they decide they've made them performant
| enough after a few years of that, don't be surprised if
| they use them as CPUs and stop needing to license cores
| and ISAs from ARM at all.
|
| But I can promise you one thing. Apple didn't look at the
| 18 MHz v7 cores from Cirrus Logic in the Psion Series 5
| and immediately decide they could make a mainstream
| desktop CPU out of it. The competition of companies like
| Samsung, Qualcomm, and Broadcom in consumer electronics
| has a _lot_ to do with how ARM cores became suitable for
| Macbook.
| Someone wrote:
| > Apple didn't look at the 18 MHz v7 cores from Cirrus
| Logic in the Psion Series 5 and immediately decide they
| could make a mainstream desktop CPU out of it.
|
| It's more likely that Psion looked at the 20 MHz ARM
| cores that Apple shipped in the Newton and decided they
| could make a Psion with that.
| klelatti wrote:
| The bit you've missed out here is that the ARM64 ISA is
| very different to earlier Arm ISAs and that Apple almost
| certainly was deeply involved in its development and was
| first with a production core.
|
| Given that and in the absence of a clear rationale I find
| it hard to see why Apple would want to to incur the costs
| of a move to an ISA it's had no influence over -
| certainly not to save an immaterial licensing fee.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| True.
|
| But I think more importantly, there will be no demand until
| someone makes a RISC-V CPU that can actually compete with
| Intel, AMD and Apple on performance.
| packetlost wrote:
| I don't think that's necessarily a prerequisite. At least
| you could conceivably see demand for low-power, moderate
| performance Chromebook(-like) devices. For true desktop
| computing, yeah, I agree.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| A fees dollars saved from not paying ARM will guarantee
| adoption in low end laptops, tablets and smartphones.
|
| $100 Laptops, $70 phones and $50 tablets will be a big
| target for RISC-V.
| giantrobot wrote:
| All of those things you mention take advantage of the
| economies of scale of ARM production. They exist because
| a few years ago the basebands they're using were top of
| the line and were used in upmarket devices. They can buy
| an old baseband/board design, attach a screen and
| battery, and have a cheapo device for essentially zero
| development cost.
|
| If RISC-V doesn't see the development for upmarket
| products it's not going to magically take over the
| downmarket segments. No one footing the development bill
| is going to selling $50 tablets.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| RV is already taking over the downmarket in embedded, and
| moving upmarket from there. There's no reason why they
| couldn't repeat this in other device classes, including
| mobile.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| ARM could just start price-matching the various RISC-V
| vendors, making themselves the easier choice due to the
| software ecosystem
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| They would have to offer the core for free to the SOC
| designers.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| The (good) riscv cores designs that implement the spec
| aren't free, it's the ISA spec that is free.
|
| There are some open source riscv cores, but the paid ones
| make money for a reason
| cpeterso wrote:
| A good example was Windows NT. Over its lifetime, NT has
| supported Intel i860, x86, x86-64, Itanium, MIPS, Alpha,
| PowerPC, ARM, and ARM64. But today it only supports x86,
| x86-64, ARM, and ARM64. Alpha even had a Rosetta-like JIT
| to run x86 applications, though it was pretty slow.
| skybrian wrote:
| One datapoint: I don't know how popular OnShape is, but it
| seems to have a lot of features and I'm happy running CAD
| in a browser for hobbyist stuff.
| ephbit wrote:
| > ... next to no demand for a RISC-V based desktop computer
| ..
|
| One thing that RISC-V enables is open source hardware CPUs.
| There are quite a few people who're upset by stuff like the
| Intel Management Engine IME making them distrust their
| personal computer.
|
| These folks don't really have any options that fit their
| criteria right now.
|
| Some RISC-V CPU could fit in there.
| loudmax wrote:
| Over the next five? Probably not.
|
| But over ten or fifteen years? Very possibly. And if not
| porting apps directly to RISC-V, then porting them to WASM
| and letting browser vendors optimize WASM performance on
| RISC-V.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The flexibility that makes RISC-V so compelling in embedded
| roles (what if I want 64 bit address but don't need hardware
| floating point?) makes it a harder target for the sort of
| workloads that you'd usually run on a server or desktop. If I
| were going to create an open high performance core to challenge
| x86 and ARM's A series cores I'd probably use PowerPC as a base
| rather than RISC-V. But I do think that RISC-V has a bright
| future in other segments.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What are the trade-offs of PowerPC vs RISC-V?
| Symmetry wrote:
| In addition to RISC-V being more flexible than ideal here,
| PowerPC is more complicated as an instruction set which is
| a drawback if you're a student learning to implement your
| first processor or in a deeply embedded role. But given the
| huge amount of effort that goes into a high performance
| core it gets lost in the noise and it lets you execute
| tasks in fewer instructions without crazy difficult to
| implement levels of instruction fusion.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| RISC-V is very flexible, yes, but most 'desktop-
| class'/application processors are expected to implement at
| least RV64GC. G is short for IMAFD, so mul/div, atomics, and
| floating point are all in there, as well as compressed
| instructions (C) to reduce code size.
|
| Other features you're likely to want are also included in the
| specification, so if you want to write code that uses for
| example the B bit manipulation extension or the V vector
| extension (which is scalable with vector width as well,
| unlike SSE/AVX) you just have to check a standardized 'CPUID'
| bit and can run your code, and otherwise fall back to other
| code.
|
| I also believe that the spec may let operating systems hook
| these instructions and provide fallbacks so application
| developers don't have to, but I'm not too sure on the
| specifics of the privileged ISA of RISC-V.
| baybal2 wrote:
| mlindner wrote:
| Using RISC-V doesn't let you bypass chip shortages... Do they
| actually understand what they're talking about?
| lnsru wrote:
| No, but the journalist needed to create some content. Here you
| go, it's written. I really can't connect RISC-V and the fact,
| that I can't buy some digital and analog components. There is
| no processor in voltage regulators, PHY, nor in ADCs/DACs I
| use. These dumb parts do not benefit from RISV-V in any way.
| martin1975 wrote:
| Sometimes it's not about an actual shortage, but more of an
| imposed (political/business motivated) shortage. If RISC-V can
| alleviate these concerns, the alleged 'shortage' may disappear.
| mlindner wrote:
| That's a shortage on the reseller side not the production
| side.
| worldofmatthew wrote:
| Any fab is allowed to produce a RISC-V CPU. You will also have
| far more core designs that can work across different
| fabrication possess.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| It's not obvious that any RISC-V CPUs that might be able to
| compete with ARM/x86 will be free in the future. It would
| take a lot of money to design them, why would the company
| that does that just give it away for free?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How many fabs are sitting around doing nothing saying _" Oh
| gosh, I wish we were allowed to make something!"_. Less than
| zero, because new fabs being built already have orders and
| plans for what they'll be making Day1.
| cptskippy wrote:
| The limiting factor of a Fab is the process node. RISC-V
| doesn't magically boost the capability of large process
| nodes.
| zogomoox wrote:
| Eventually, if you have pin-compatible chips from several
| manufacturers, they could replace chips from lets say Taiwan
| with ones from Europe perhaps?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| RISC-V isn't, fundamentally, about pin level compatibility
| between manufacturers. It's about the ISA and its design.
| It's closer to AMD/Intel both providing X86 and x64 chips.
| Software will (mostly, modulo proprietary extensions) run on
| both, but they are not physically interchangeable. A EE/CMPE
| (or, more likely, team of them) still has to design the
| actual physical chips, and that's not necessarily going to be
| given away so freely.
| crote wrote:
| More likely to be the other way around, actually.
|
| Boards are getting designed for a _specific_ chip and you are
| extremely unlikely to change that - unless the original is no
| longer available. Re-engineering for a new chip can be a
| massive pain - even if the new one is pin-compatible. If you
| are delivering high-quality products, you are not going to
| switch.
|
| With the exception of some trivial ones, western
| manufacturers don't really make pin-compatible chips.
| Creating a chip which is electronically _identical_ is not
| easy at all - and don 't forget you probably have to make it
| firmware-compatible as well. The end result is that you now
| have exactly the same product as your competitor, so you are
| now competing primarily on price and making it easier for
| your customers to leave you. Oh, and you open yourself up to
| lawsuits too. Creating unique products is way for those
| manufacturers.
|
| On the other hand, eastern manufacturers are more than happy
| to create exact clones. A lot of shitty electronics don't
| really care too much about things like longevity, warranty,
| compatibility, or even regulations. Just make sure it
| functions well enough to make it out of the store. So a
| manufacturer like GigaDevice creates the GD32F103, which is
| pretty much a clone of the STM32F103 by STMicroelectronics -
| down to firmware compatibility. Won't get used in any product
| whose brand you recognize, but with the ongoing chip shortage
| they are definitely selling like hot cakes.
|
| But implementing an instruction set is not easy, and ARM
| might actually try to do something about it if you do it
| without their permission. With RISC-V, you can just grab any
| random implementation! Perhaps even an open-source one?
| GigaDevice has already released their first RISC-V clone: the
| GD32VF103. Again a clone of the STM32F103, but you now need
| to recompile for a different ISA.
| amelius wrote:
| If you can't have the existing chips, why not use your time to
| think about better chips?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Why is it better than say ARM?
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