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I don't think [1] should be a footnote. This is not an x86. This is a new 1970-style ISA with a textbook RISC implementation, but without the ISA that made RI
by FullyFunctional 11y ago
I don't think [1] should be a footnote. This is not an x86. This is a new 1970-style ISA with a textbook RISC implementation, but without the ISA that made RISC work. I predict this will fail, not because of the Quark ISA, but because Intel can't compete with the sheer diversity of microcontroller implementations that can only come from a highly competitive market. ARM currently hold sway in this market, with MIPS in niches. In future I expect to see RISC-V show up where license cost or customization matters more than software legacy.
- asmithmd1 11y agoI wouldn't bet against the oldest and biggest CPU vendor. Atmel of Arduino fame had $1.4B in sales last year. Microchip who was the hobbyist's go to before the Arduino had $2.1B in sales. Freescale who is the corporate descendant of Motorola microcontrollers had $4.6B. Intel had $55.9B in sales and $11.7B in profit - more then enough profit to buy every chip those other three companies made last year. Intel missed mobile - almost no cell phones have Intel inside - they are going to catch the next wave or die trying.
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- joezydeco 11y agoBut, unlike the PC market with 2-3 major manufacturers, Intel can't bully around thousands of independent shops and OEMs that buy 1K/10K/100K quantities of Atmel/NXP/Freescale/Renesas/TI parts every year. I lead system architecture for one of them and Intel is so off my radar that I wouldn't even look twice at the Quark/Edison line. Unless they want to give them to me for free, that is. If those chips are their IoT play, I'm not seeing any advantage yet. Show me how you're going to complete with TI or Broadcom. And how many $3 D1000s do you have to move to match the margin generated by one server-class CPU core? (BTW, NXP bought Freescale earlier this year so it's really 4.6B + 5.6B once the merge is completed.)
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- tdicola 11y agoWhat's the tooling like for this ISA, anyone know? IMHO that's what will make or break this thing. If you can't output code for it from GCC or LLVM then why even bother looking at it.
- PeCaN 11y agoGCC can compile to both 32- and 64-bit Itanium, as can Intel's toolchain (which is what I imagine most people will be using for this).