[HN Gopher] Intel announces Arm investment, talks up RISC-V
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Intel announces Arm investment, talks up RISC-V
        
       Author : klelatti
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2023-09-07 07:32 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
        
       | gavinray wrote:
       | I'm 26 and I don't know anything about finance or stocks.
       | 
       | I've never invested before and I'm planning on purchasing ARM
       | stock the day they IPO.
       | 
       | Is this a bad idea? I was planning on investing a sizeable chunk
       | of my savings.
        
         | wskinner wrote:
         | Yes. If you know nothing about investing, the best thing you
         | can do is read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It's quick and
         | easy and explains why beating the market by picking stocks is
         | not a great way to invest.
        
           | qznc wrote:
           | For people who prefer a website over a book, this is a solid
           | place to start: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page
        
         | Varloom wrote:
         | Softbank are dumping their shares in ARM while at peak
         | valuation, before RISC-V eats its market share (they saw it
         | coming, that's why they are rushing to IPO before rise of
         | RISC-V).
         | 
         | Most big ARM clients are dumping ARM for RISC-V.
         | 
         | Including, Qualcomm:
         | 
         | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms...
         | 
         | Google (Converting whole Android system to support RISC-V):
         | 
         | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-off...
         | 
         | And Samsung :
         | 
         | https://research.samsung.com/news/Samsung-Electronics-Partic...
         | 
         | When you want to invest look for the underdog, not a company
         | that has it's market share ready to be eaten alive by RISC-V in
         | the coming 5-10 years.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | janc_ wrote:
           | Not dumping ARM, but certainly moving away from being ARM-
           | only, so ARM's share of the market will drop...
        
         | usr1106 wrote:
         | Investing a sizeable chunk of your savings is gambling. In a
         | couple of years you will know whether it was a good idea or
         | not. And some so-called experts will tell you, that's what we
         | said. And some other so-called experts will be very quiet.
        
         | brucehoult wrote:
         | If you don't know anything about finance or stocks then you are
         | EXACTLY the retail customer they are looking for!
         | 
         | SoftBank paid $32 billion for Arm in 2016. People at the time
         | were saying that was waaay too much, and that was even without
         | 99.9% of people in the industry having RISC-V on their radar
         | yet.
         | 
         | A fair valuation of Arm, assuming that they're going to grow at
         | a kind of industrial average rate from here on, would be 15 to
         | 20 times annual profits. That's something like $8 to $12
         | billion. $50 billion is insanity.
        
         | formerly_proven wrote:
         | Buy an ETF instead, this is a bagholder IPO riding the AI hype.
         | Do you want to be a bagholder?
        
       | SilverBirch wrote:
       | This may seem like a dumb question: Do we know how much Intel is
       | paying? I can understand Intel wanting to invest.... but at what
       | price and how much? Because I could imagine Softbank (who seem
       | pretty desparate at this point) punting off big chunks of the
       | company at a discount simply to try and trick retail into
       | inesting. It's certainly not ethical, is it legal?
        
       | roughly wrote:
       | To be honest, it's a little hard to really take this seriously.
       | The number of times I've watched Intel make Serious Declarations
       | of Significant Strategic Realignments in the last decade or so
       | only to watch them inevitably shed all the new divisions and
       | product lines to Focus On Core Products makes it hard to really
       | give this the attention it might warrant.
        
         | imachine1980_ wrote:
         | they are making only one bet now, (two if you account discrete
         | gpu), making the production of the chip different division than
         | the design of the x86 processors, and selling as service , most
         | of this chips are arm or risc-v base so this is more a
         | necessity to change the brand awardness and say "we will
         | produce your non x86 chips", and we are in the committees of
         | this technologies.
        
           | BirAdam wrote:
           | Not only is IFS a separate division, it's almost a different
           | company. The x86 group has to purchase foundry services IIRC.
        
         | mhh__ wrote:
         | The difference now is that Intel is being run by an engineer
         | again so at very least there might be some top-down strategy.
        
           | depereo wrote:
           | Pat hasn't been an engineer for a long, long time. He doesn't
           | appear to act or plan like one now.
        
           | brucethemoose2 wrote:
           | And yet they are still delaying releases, canceling promising
           | products, and making some questionable technical choices
           | (like overhauling AVX512 _and_ bifurcating the new standard,
           | instead of uniting it like ARM and AMD did, among others).
           | 
           | I like Pat, I like what Pat says, I get plans are long term,
           | but it still feels like the rubber is not meeting the road.
        
             | tester756 wrote:
             | >canceling promising products
             | 
             | Like? I hope you aren't talking about Optane
        
               | someperson wrote:
               | What was wrong with Optane?
        
               | tester756 wrote:
               | There was nothing wrong with Optane (I'm talking about
               | non-volatile memory, it is important because there were a
               | few products under Optane name)
               | 
               | I believe that was/is impressive tech.
               | 
               | You could have disk and ram in one stick aka kinda
               | unified memory.
               | 
               | Think of it: instead of purchasing RAM+Disk, you purchase
               | one stick and configure it as e.g 40% of the capacity
               | works as a disk and 60% as a "RAM".
               | 
               | But saying that they "cancelled" doesn't tell the whole
               | story.
               | 
               | IIRC: they couldnt find a fab which would produce them
               | after Micron sold their fab.
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | It was supposed to be cheaper than the equivalent amount
               | of ordinary DRAM but ended up more expensive and slower.
        
               | networkchad wrote:
               | [dead]
        
         | oldgradstudent wrote:
         | It's not just the last decade
         | 
         | Does anyone remember ViiV, or explain what exactly it was?
        
           | paulmd wrote:
           | just looks like centrino or the multimedia PC standard: a
           | basket of technologies (and like centrino/ultrabook, all
           | intel ones) that define a standard for media PCs and set-top
           | hardware that would support a certain distribution model.
           | 
           | now of course a lot of people didn't get what centrino was
           | either (or what vpro is today!). it's a little hard to market
           | these hardware standards when it's not something obvious like
           | "the multimedia PC standard" that consumers grok. But it's
           | the same kind of idea: we're going to need X, Y and Z
           | hardware and feature support to do this workload or customer
           | use-case. If your PC has it, then it's
           | Centrino/Ultrabook/whatever!
           | 
           | But again I think it's true that people respond more
           | intuitively to the idea of branding the product and not the
           | platform. "Ultrabook" or "Multimedia PC Level 3" makes more
           | sense as a concept to people than "Centrino" or "Viiv".
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook
        
             | MenhirMike wrote:
             | Centrino was an absolute slam-dunk success that did
             | significantly bring x86 laptop computers forward (it may
             | not be complete hyperbole to say that the Pentium M is the
             | most important Intel CPU of this century), but in some ways
             | it became obsolete by its own success: As all laptop
             | manufacturers followed and gave us Ultrabooks that were
             | amazing, Centrino as a brand didn't become a differentiator
             | anymore, and Viiv just wasn't offering anything important
             | enough - though the brand made perfect sense, given how hot
             | Media Center PCs were for a short while.
        
       | jmclnx wrote:
       | No, I do not want Intel to touch anything associated with RISC-V.
       | I do not want to see Intel MI cloned into RISC-V (and other
       | backdoors), nevermind all the SMT Issues Intel is having.
        
         | BirAdam wrote:
         | Too late, see Horse Creek.
        
       | mhh__ wrote:
       | Intel can dig for gold and sell shovels here at the same time
       | here.
       | 
       | They have a long way to go (it will require a herculean effort by
       | the leadership) but nonetheless the upside potential is huge.
        
         | PartiallyTyped wrote:
         | Will Nvidia do something similar? If not dig themselves, could
         | they actually design and license derivatives of Risc-v? I don't
         | know how licensing works here.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | They could but they have a very strong relationship / want to
           | acquire arm so it might not make much sense in today's terms
           | -- for Nvidia, Arm/RISC-V is more of a software thing and
           | they've spent a lot of money making their drivers and
           | toolchain work on Arm so similar.
           | 
           | My point WRT shovels is selling fabrication, which Nvidia
           | can't do, to be clear.
        
       | drexlspivey wrote:
       | ARM is preparing to IPO next week, their main business is
       | collecting license fees. Here are last year's income statement:
       | 
       | Revenue: $2.67B (down from 2.7)
       | 
       | Gross profit margin: 96%
       | 
       | Net Profit: $524m
       | 
       | And they are planning to IPO at a valuation of 60-70 billion
       | dollars! Thats a P/E of 130 and a P/S of 25. Frankly this is
       | ridiculous for a company that collects license fees, there is no
       | potential for massive growth, all smartphones are using ARM chips
       | already and their biggest client has a perpetual license already.
       | Why is it valued like a tech startup?
       | 
       | This is Softbank dumping on retail and they somehow got Apple and
       | Intel to buy a small piece of the IPO (700m combined).
        
         | tester756 wrote:
         | Do I understand ARM's business?
         | 
         | They rely on people wanting to design their own ~~ships~~ chips
         | 
         | So if we assume that their ecosystem is healthly and mature at
         | this moment,
         | 
         | then there's potential that customers wanting to design their
         | own stuff will go to them.
         | 
         | So until RISC-V matures, then they'll be making profits, yup?
         | 
         | But is there growth potential? Are companies really interested
         | in designing their own chips except a few startups that already
         | license from them and probably google/amazon/whatever that need
         | highly specialized chips, but already license from them?
         | 
         | What I'm missing?
        
           | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
           | > then there's potential that customers wanting to design
           | their own stuff will go to them.
           | 
           | There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design
           | their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. Licencing ARM for that
           | sort of thing is both costly and a pain in the arse and a
           | distraction from actual processor development.
           | 
           | You dismiss startups, but the ripest growth market for
           | processors is in AI accelerators and they are predominantly
           | RISC-V based in the startup world.
           | 
           | RISC-V is growing fast and has a structural advantage to
           | ARM's ISA monopoly, in that sense it is a real danger to
           | ARM's business model.
        
           | DesiLurker wrote:
           | purely from investment perspective the scaling RISC-V
           | development provides a hard cap on the how aggressive their
           | pricing policy can be. At this point all major SoC companies
           | have some interest/activity in RISC-V development so I doubt
           | ARM is is in any form of monopoly position. with basically
           | negates any significant stock growth opportunity. Given that
           | era of cheap/easy money is done I really doubt anything good
           | will come out for the IPO holders. this is just finding a
           | bag-holder.
        
           | Veserv wrote:
           | Generally speaking, ARM sells chip blueprints in return for a
           | royalty on every chip manufactured using their blueprints (or
           | designed to be compatible). Their growth potential is more
           | chips being made using their blueprints or getting a higher
           | royalty per chip manufactured.
        
         | cma wrote:
         | > there is no potential for massive growth, all smartphones are
         | using ARM chips already and their biggest client has a
         | perpetual license already.
         | 
         | There's a war for the next platform. Meta uses ARM, while Magic
         | Leap 2 for instance uses x64.
        
         | dehrmann wrote:
         | > there is no potential for massive growth
         | 
         | There is the PC business, but it's slowly dying. Seems a bit
         | late in the game to drag it to a new architecture.
         | 
         | Datacenters are another place ARM might see growth, but Intel
         | and AMD already competitive there. The biggest growth area
         | might be Nvidia's Grace Hopper, but you might as well buy
         | (already overpriced?) NVDA.
         | 
         | The reasons for IPOs are for investors to cash out (Saudi
         | Aramco) or to raise money for growth (tech before ~2010). This
         | feels like a cash-out. It's not that investors will necessarily
         | _lose_ money, it 's that they're buying a much more mature
         | company than they think.
        
         | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
         | The strange thing is that even if Softbank is effective at
         | floating at this valuation (apparently by having 28 banks
         | hawking the IPO and having a small float), there is almost no
         | prospect of it remaining at that valuation, and Softbank is
         | left holding the vast majority of the shares.
         | 
         | I don't see how this doesn't end in tears. It seems to be
         | mostly wishful thinking.
        
       | mhandley wrote:
       | Seems like this is mostly about making sure that Intel Foundry
       | customers who will inevitably use lots of ARM processors are well
       | supported.
        
         | rwmj wrote:
         | This is exactly the reason. There are now (in all but corporate
         | legality) two Intels, the one that makes x86 and the one that
         | runs the foundries. Most RISC-V was going to be made on TSMC,
         | and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) wants a piece.
        
       | joachimma wrote:
       | Anyone have some insight into why RISC-V seems to be getting
       | traction?
       | 
       | Has there not been prior attempts to make an open source cpu?
       | 
       | Is there a lot of skill in making the ISA? It seems to me
       | (naively) that most talented EE students could probably come up
       | with their own ISA, or is there some "magic" in the RISC-V one?
       | 
       | I assume that there are a reference implementations in
       | VHDL/Verilog and Cadence and good support in compilers. Is this
       | what pushed through, where others failed?
        
         | spiralpolitik wrote:
         | The big part is royalty-free open-source licenses. If you don't
         | want to pay ARM for an ISA and RISC-V is good enough for your
         | needs then RISC-V might be for you.
         | 
         | Plus there are limitations on which countries the latest ARM
         | designs can be shipped to. RISC-V has no such limitation. The
         | RISC-V Foundation is based in Switzerland and so isn't subject
         | to US trade sanctions.
        
         | photonbeam wrote:
         | Nvidia trying to purchase Arm got a lot of companies noticing
         | that they have a sole-source provider, and instead want options
        
         | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
         | Because it's a free, well designed, clean and simple ISA.
        
         | askvictor wrote:
         | ARM also license chip designs that implement the architecture.
         | Not quite sure, but I think they'll do (for a fee) much of the
         | process of making a chip that doesn't involve the fab.
        
         | BirAdam wrote:
         | ARM had some blunders with licensing changes for one, and then
         | the split with ARM China was bad. Price plays a part. The next
         | thing is that several open designs, including the reference
         | design from Berkley, did very well at optimizing the most
         | common instructions on which easily 90% of computation actually
         | happens. As a result, very early RISC-V silicon showed
         | seriously good performance at extremely low cost. As things are
         | now, RISC-V is becoming increasingly competitive with ARM and
         | x86 with amazing rapidity. There will be a few more hurdles in
         | making RISC-V as performant as x86 or ARM, but given the ISA's
         | open source nature, many eyes will make all bugs shallow.
        
       | meepmorp wrote:
       | Oh wow, it's xscale again.
        
       | micvbang wrote:
       | Somewhat related: I believe RISC-V is going to well in the coming
       | decade. I've been trying to figure out what I can invest in to
       | get exposed to it, but have been unable to find anything. If
       | anybody had got any angles, I'd love to hear them!
        
         | photonbeam wrote:
         | You could buy private stock for some companies like SiFive on
         | something like EquityZen.
         | 
         | Other companies are already public, like Andes
         | 
         | Look at names of companies that give talks at
         | https://events.linuxfoundation.org/riscv-summit/
        
           | rwmj wrote:
           | I'm guessing most of the value will be taken by TSMC. They
           | don't care who wins :-) This move is about Intel Foundry
           | Services (IFS) trying to get some of that action. IFS is now
           | operated separately from the x86 part of the company.
        
         | prabhu-yu wrote:
         | .
        
           | dboreham wrote:
           | I thought parent was asking about potential stock investments
           | that could be expected to do well based on future RISC-V
           | popularity.
        
             | micvbang wrote:
             | You're right!
        
         | upsidedownside wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | mattnewton wrote:
         | Depends on where you think the value will accrue - Maybe cloud
         | providers who are some of x86's biggest customers today but
         | would switch if workloads work there? But their bottom line is
         | exposed to so many different things it's not a clean bet.
         | 
         | For the processors designers themselves, I wouldn't bet outside
         | value accrues to them since the instruction set is open and
         | competition could be fierce.
         | 
         | Another option would be to figure out who you think will be
         | manufacturing the other peripherals needed to use RISC
         | processors. Something like Supermicro on the server side (which
         | benefitted hugely from a similar relationship making nvidia
         | cards into servers), or find some supplier on whatever market
         | you think will pop because of RISC-V (automotive, military
         | systems, etc). Basically whoever turns these processors into
         | finished systems is probably a good bet, but I haven't done
         | enough research to know who that would be.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | I can see AWS developing a risc-v based cpu, like with
           | gravitons as a competing offer.
           | 
           | disclaimer: this is pure speculation, I am not privy to any
           | information, I am just a rando engineer.
        
           | micvbang wrote:
           | Thank you. Yes, I agree that it's a good idea to look for
           | companies that create divided systems based on RISC-V. It's
           | primarily these I've had trouble to identify :)
        
         | sobkas wrote:
         | I believe RISC-V will recreate balkanization and UNIX wars of
         | the past. There will be just to much incentive for corporations
         | to introduce closed/proprietary extension to distinguish
         | themselves from their competitors. So either users would be
         | forced to use only core specification(that would be not as
         | competitive as new extensions) or be forced to choose extended
         | ISA from one of big players.
        
           | paulmd wrote:
           | Yes. People upthread are talking about how corporations want
           | to recreate the open software revolution with open hardware
           | and this will (and already does) play out exactly like it has
           | with open software: big vendors extract all the value from
           | the product, contribute nothing back, and keep any cool
           | features they come up with internal and proprietary.
           | 
           | This is the problem with arm, it's this foundational
           | technology that underpins everything from Grace to Dojo and
           | TPU and yet arm doesn't make any fucking money. They lost
           | money during the first year of the pandemic (and the two
           | years prior iirc!) despite the boom in electronics sales!
           | 
           | Nvidia buying arm for the synergy of forcing CUDA as the
           | default arm graphics IP (and BYO for higher price) was the
           | good ending. Nobody else is going to pay $40b for a company
           | that makes 0.5b +/- 1b without some other synergy, and the
           | other possibilities are companies like Samsung, tsmc, or
           | Oracle with their own synergies.
           | 
           | Well, if it's not nvidia (and it seems any other buyout would
           | be equally unlikely to get approval) then SoftBank is just
           | gonna have to make the existing licensees pay up, and cash
           | out the business that way (revenue and then IPO). So there's
           | a lot of licensees who are going to find an extra zero on
           | their TCO of ARM usage.
           | 
           | That's the reason you saw Qualcomm pitch a fit and start
           | lying about the terms of their licensing deal last year. And
           | google and meta and Amazon are equally upset. And they're
           | gonna start funding a competitor.
           | 
           | Those companies (and the bulk android market) mostly don't
           | care about performance, this is the "cheapest thing that
           | works" market. The accelerator (TPU etc) is the thing that
           | really matters now.
           | 
           | There may be a minimal amount of collaboration (ala Minix or
           | CDDL) to build that common platform but that's all they
           | really care about, is some basic P-core and E-core designs.
           | There is no incentive for Amazon to build processors that are
           | way faster than googles, actually everyone is still selling
           | vCPUs based on sandy bridge processing power. They'd rather
           | make cheaper smaller CPUs (this is why zen4c and zen5c exist,
           | in large part) than compete on performance or features.
           | That's just not where the secret sauce is, and it's not where
           | the revenue is.
           | 
           | So we are going to see the same thing as the software space,
           | where vendors take the fruit of risc-v, build their own stuff
           | around it, and pay nothing and contribute nothing back.
           | Everything important will live in proprietary, non-portable
           | IP that doesn't need to be shared under open terms. The same
           | problems as always when you BSD/MIT license.
           | 
           | The future is a google TPU that you are not allowed to
           | purchase yourself, stamping on a human face endlessly. But
           | the boot will be based on a core of open-source/open-license
           | designs, how wonderful! (with the interesting parts living
           | inside proprietary parts of the core ofc)
           | 
           | Nvidia/CUDA dominance is _way_ better than google platform-
           | as-service that you can't even run on-prem if you wanted to.
           | And for all you can say about them, nvidia has never stopped
           | pushing to the next thing, even when they had an
           | insurmountable lead, and even when nobody else believed in
           | the goal or saw where they were trying to go. Google and
           | Amazon don't benefit from pushing the limit like this, they
           | just want cheap arm.micro instances and a host for their
           | proprietary accelerators.
           | 
           | The difference between BSD/MIT and GPL is fundamentally about
           | who gets the freedom - BSD/MIT let developers do what they
           | want with it, and that sometimes comes at the expense of user
           | freedoms. And when google/Amazon/meta want free cores, they
           | certainly don't mean free for you.
        
           | brucehoult wrote:
           | Since RISC-V already has standard extensions for pretty much
           | every feature that any other mainstream ISA has, it is pretty
           | hard to see what is left for generally-applicable custom
           | extensions that make enough difference to be worth getting
           | locked in to.
           | 
           | The only Balkanization that has occurred so far is companies
           | implementing draft versions of standard extensions because
           | they don't want to wait years for the final version: e.g. the
           | Kendryte K210 with priv ISA 1.9.1 [1], THead C906 and C910
           | implementing draft 0.7.1 of the Vector specification [2],
           | THead implementing Physical Memory Attributes which didn't
           | even have an official draft spec yet, THead and Andes
           | implementing equivalents to (mostly) the eventual Zb or Zc
           | extensions [3]
           | 
           | None of that has much in the way of lock-in as affected code
           | can be either simply recompiled using the relevant official
           | extension or else trivially ported.
           | 
           | [1] they appear to have simply used the current Berkeley
           | Rocket snapshot at the time, 1.10 is what was ratified
           | 
           | [2] which document said "we think we're really really close
           | to being ready to ratify this" but there turned out to be
           | three more major revisions over 1.5 years. Nevertheless, many
           | important library functions such as memcpy() are binary
           | compatible between them, and forward-porting other 0.7.1 code
           | to 1.0 is trivial.
           | 
           | [3] e.g. clz and popcount, shift-and-add for addressing
           | calculations, byteswap, short opcodes for simple forms of
           | byte load/store
        
           | whatshisface wrote:
           | If that happens we will just end up with math libraries with
           | tons of feature detection branches and the return of Gentoo.
        
         | cinntaile wrote:
         | Then your actual bet is that RISC-V based products will
         | outperform products based on competing ISAs, no?
        
           | micvbang wrote:
           | Yeah. My thought is that RISC-V has the potential to be very
           | competitive in terms of compute/watt and compute/$. At the
           | very least versus x86, but hopefully also with arm
        
             | hakfoo wrote:
             | I'd expect it would expand the market for customized
             | SoC/microcontroller parts.
             | 
             | We know there's already a lot of "built to purpose" RISC-V
             | products ending up in embedded environments. When you have
             | less obligations to a restrictive ISA grant, you can make
             | something that fits your needs exactly.
             | 
             | So the business case is second-order:
             | 
             | * As has repeatedly been joked, fab companies who aren't
             | locked to a captive/capricious owner (Intel) look
             | appealing. It likely isn't about cutting-edge there, but
             | the flexibility to handle diverse custom orders. Plenty of
             | these products will be like "133MHz and a couple hundred
             | thousand gates" that would be fine on 90nm or bigger.
             | 
             | * Firms that can move from "product" to "consultancy".
             | There's a lot of brilliant work in existing ARM and RISC-V
             | MCUs, but will existing firms be able to move away from
             | "here's a matrix of features, order from the list" and into
             | "Let us meet with your team, build a custom pick-and-mix
             | and add a bespoke unit to meet your need for (smaller
             | number than was historically common) product-specific
             | MCUs?"
        
               | bradstewart wrote:
               | Is there something unique to RISC that makes it
               | inexpensive to manufacture custom chips?
               | 
               | Otherwise, I'd imagine the cost of the mask set and
               | validation to far, far outweigh any reduction in unit
               | cost you might see from a custom chip. MCUs are already
               | extremely cheap, especially if you're buying significant
               | quantities.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | mhh__ wrote:
             | That's such a weak edge you might as well just buy
             | TSMC/ASML or even Intel their fab business play works out.
        
           | rwmj wrote:
           | The ISA is permissionless. You don't have to sign any legal
           | documents, just download the specs, download some chip
           | designs off github, and get going. The model is very
           | different from x86 and Arm.
        
           | 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
           | They might, on the basis of it being an open unencumbered ISA
           | that will see a lot of investment from parties trying to get
           | rid of Intel/ARM dependencies.
           | 
           | Think of it a bit like what happened to JS. Being the open
           | language the web runs, it saw immense competition from
           | multiple particles and today we have a what should be a
           | shitty dynamically typed prototype based scripting language
           | outperform and outoptimize the likes of Java with its static
           | classes and types in some scenarios.
        
             | mhh__ wrote:
             | Is JS faster than java?
             | 
             | Also the web ecosystem is still basically a pile of shit on
             | a few key metrics compared.to (say) boring Microsoft-land
             | stuff a decade or 3 ago, so I'm not so sure if that's such
             | a good argument.
        
             | alostpuppy wrote:
             | Just as God intended
        
             | qwytw wrote:
             | I would be wary about comparing software to hardware in
             | this way. Open source software is generally only successful
             | in cases when it's a cost center not the actual end
             | product.
             | 
             | I don't see how than can work when developing competitive
             | CPU cores is extremely expensive. Why would anyone who does
             | that make them free? (even licensing seems like a poor idea
             | looking at ARMs business model).
        
           | voytec wrote:
           | It may not overpower other ISAs but could be attractive from
           | the cost-effectiveness perspective.
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | Invest in companies making esoteric accelerators, like Fujitsu,
         | Marvell, Broadcomm, probably many more I don't know about.
         | 
         | RISC-V is going to show up more and more in heavily customized
         | stuff like HPC chips or networking accelerators before it
         | starts replacing Xeons, as (right now) thats what its best
         | suited for. Look up what Jim Keller said about RISC-V usage for
         | Tenstorrent and how ARM just doesn't allow for the kind of
         | customization these specialized designs need from a
         | standardized ISA.
        
       | nickdothutton wrote:
       | I'm old enough to remember the 1997/8 Intel deal with ARM.
       | https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN0223...
        
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