4 ms·

It's completely unreasonable to expect some underdog architecture to get anywhere close to the big ones, which have pured dozens of billions of dollars into res

It's completely unreasonable to expect some underdog architecture to get anywhere close to the big ones, which have pured dozens of billions of dollars into research over decades to optimize their designs, tooling and fabrication. A reasonable expectation is to get some low-end-ish CPUs out that might be on the same level (in terms of efficiency) than older, not really optimised ARM designs. The biggest incentive RISC-V can offer is less legacy bullshit (like AArch64) and the fact that you don't have to pair royalties to ARM. Perhaps better standardisation of peripherals compared to ARM, so less time/money spent on integration, BSPs and stuff like that. (And even then: Looking at recent POWER one can see that they can outperform related Intel offerings, while being drastically less efficient.)

whazor 10y ago
Many of those billions of dollars went into production of chips, which is mostly a generic process where chip architecture is unaffected. Furthermore, research about architecture of chips has been published and can be used to create faster chips. But I have to agree that it is not easy. Especially because chip design is partly generated by software and computed by many powerful machines.
- komali2 10y ago
  What about the architecture/design itself, is any of that open? Could I find a design, send it off to china, and have them print off a couple hundred, even at a much higher price than some other processor?
  - throwawayish 10y ago
    Uh, well I guess...? But generally speaking IC fabbing doesn't happen in the "couple hundreds". If you really want that, you'd be looking at MPW (multi project wafers), were a bunch of designs are slapped on a single mask to spread yield and reduce per-party costs. (It pretty much works like PCB group manufacturing - a bunch of designs is slapped together 'til the maximum size of the fab, and then that is produced a couple times, e-tested, cut and bad pieces discarded. Everyone gets a couple copies of their design.) Today it's a bit better, since eg. GF can (in theory) offer recent nodes (eg 22 nm and smaller), which wasn't something you could get ten years ago (back then that'd be 65 nm - most low-volume and custom stuff has been iirc 130 or 180 nm).
  - gluggymug 10y ago
    Not quite because you have a few more steps in the process after the design phase. For instance, you need to perform testing on the fabricated parts to determine if there are physical defects. That means creating the tests then paying for the testing to be performed at the fabrication place.
wyager 10y ago
This is a fallacy that I see repeated about the quality of open products all the time. It's true, Intel spends more money on R&D than RISC-V is likely to ever get. But that means next to nothing. When a huge, monolithic, management-driven company spends billions of dollars on something, a lot of those billions of dollars aren't being used very effectively. Consider Linux versus Windows. My suspicion is that Microsoft has spent more money on Windows dev than has ever been spent on Linux dev. Does that mean Windows is better than Linux? No; in fact, many people who have to use both would probably say the opposite. Why is Linux the OS of choice for many production applications in tech-savvy industries? It just works better and easier than the high-budget closed competition. That's not to say that Linux is starved for funding; many large companies volunteer serious man-hours towards Linux development, because they want an open system that competes with (and beats) the crappy license-uncumbered alternative they would have to use otherwise. I expect the same thing to happen with RISC-V. You also have this phenomenon in the open-source world where you have grad students, researchers, and enthusiasts embarking on ultra-high-risk projects that would never get funded at most companies, but pay off in a big way when they work. Now that we have an open ISA to work with, I fully expect a huge outpouring of automated synthesis software based on clever new ideas that beats the clunky stuff available in industry. We've already seen this happening on the HDL side of things; open-source, research-driven efforts like Clash and Chisel are orders of magnitude better than the crap that industry has been using for years (VHDL and (System)Verilog). Give it some time for the silicon side of things to improve as well.
- throwawayish 10y ago
  > Consider Linux versus Windows. My suspicion is that Microsoft has spent more money on Windows dev than has ever been spent on Linux dev. I'm not so sure about that, if we only consider the kernel (everything else would be a lame comparison). Linux likely has had many more paid devs than the NT kernel for the last 10-15 years, if not more. > This is a fallacy I also don't think this is a fallacy. Yes, of course a large company has a big head and spending is generally much less directed and efficient than in smaller companies (big news). But, lots of money also tends to pay great talents. > that I see repeated about the quality of open products all the time. ... and I didn't mention quality anywhere. As for open source: Software has near zero initial cost, iterations are extremely fast compared to anything manufactured and software engineering is an abundant skill. Hardware has high initial costs, high manufacturing costs, iterations take a lot of time and HW design encompasses quite some areas with a much smaller pool of people being able to do it. Also, a massive company like Intel which sucks up talent all the time from the hiring pool has the resources to evaluate multiple avenues of optimization at the same time, pick what looks best, and iterate (which, pretty much, is what Intel has been doing ever since Sandy Bridge). Another example here would be Intel developing P4, a massive and staggering failure comparable to the PowerPC970 debacle (just bigger) -- and then pulling the Core arch out of the hat (which originates, guess what, from a different engineering team in a whole different branch of Intel -- again, resources!). What I do expect here is that some companies might think they can influence an arch early on by diverting resources to it, to maybe save some money in the future (by not paying ARM anymore and other synergetic effects I mentioned above), and perhaps in the hope of getting a product that outperforms ARM/the competition in some metric(s). (Also we have seen in the past in quite some instances that CPU design is a very delicate art and even pouring massive monies into it might actually not get you very far - see AIM/PowerPC [although it was quite successful in some niches] - or, on the other hand, that radically new architectures that might theoretically be better don't succeed, because you don't get the fab access, or tooling access, or software, see eg. Transputer and many related examples)
microcolonel 10y ago
FE310 appears to outperform every state-of-the-art official ARM core (and perhaps every architecture-licensee core) in its class, with maximum stable clock speeds also much higher. BooM could be described as beating Cortex A15 and matching Cortex A53 (granted without a tapeout to prove it, only simulations). Both of these designs are publicly available and under licenses which allow proprietary derivatives. In every category; die area, power dissipation, total throughput, licensing cost, lead time, design flexibility, code density, technical debt, academic buy-in; real RISC-V cores which have been made in silicon are right-now beating ARM cores. At this point, ARM has but two things going for it: legacy and design maturity. Once RISC-V designs are mature enough to be expected to run all general-purpose software correctly; there will be few other axes to compete on. RISC-V has an immense zero-day advantage in its clean, worldly design. I think it would be foolish to downplay the likelihood of great success.

whazor 10y ago

Many of those billions of dollars went into production of chips, which is mostly a generic process where chip architecture is unaffected. Furthermore, research about architecture of chips has been published and can be used to create faster chips. But I have to agree that it is not easy. Especially because chip design is partly generated by software and computed by many powerful machines.

komali2 10y ago
What about the architecture/design itself, is any of that open? Could I find a design, send it off to china, and have them print off a couple hundred, even at a much higher price than some other processor?
- throwawayish 10y ago
  Uh, well I guess...? But generally speaking IC fabbing doesn't happen in the "couple hundreds". If you really want that, you'd be looking at MPW (multi project wafers), were a bunch of designs are slapped on a single mask to spread yield and reduce per-party costs. (It pretty much works like PCB group manufacturing - a bunch of designs is slapped together 'til the maximum size of the fab, and then that is produced a couple times, e-tested, cut and bad pieces discarded. Everyone gets a couple copies of their design.) Today it's a bit better, since eg. GF can (in theory) offer recent nodes (eg 22 nm and smaller), which wasn't something you could get ten years ago (back then that'd be 65 nm - most low-volume and custom stuff has been iirc 130 or 180 nm).
- gluggymug 10y ago
  Not quite because you have a few more steps in the process after the design phase. For instance, you need to perform testing on the fabricated parts to determine if there are physical defects. That means creating the tests then paying for the testing to be performed at the fabrication place.

wyager 10y ago

This is a fallacy that I see repeated about the quality of open products all the time. It's true, Intel spends more money on R&D than RISC-V is likely to ever get. But that means next to nothing. When a huge, monolithic, management-driven company spends billions of dollars on something, a lot of those billions of dollars aren't being used very effectively. Consider Linux versus Windows. My suspicion is that Microsoft has spent more money on Windows dev than has ever been spent on Linux dev. Does that mean Windows is better than Linux? No; in fact, many people who have to use both would probably say the opposite. Why is Linux the OS of choice for many production applications in tech-savvy industries? It just works better and easier than the high-budget closed competition. That's not to say that Linux is starved for funding; many large companies volunteer serious man-hours towards Linux development, because they want an open system that competes with (and beats) the crappy license-uncumbered alternative they would have to use otherwise. I expect the same thing to happen with RISC-V. You also have this phenomenon in the open-source world where you have grad students, researchers, and enthusiasts embarking on ultra-high-risk projects that would never get funded at most companies, but pay off in a big way when they work. Now that we have an open ISA to work with, I fully expect a huge outpouring of automated synthesis software based on clever new ideas that beats the clunky stuff available in industry. We've already seen this happening on the HDL side of things; open-source, research-driven efforts like Clash and Chisel are orders of magnitude better than the crap that industry has been using for years (VHDL and (System)Verilog). Give it some time for the silicon side of things to improve as well.

throwawayish 10y ago
> Consider Linux versus Windows. My suspicion is that Microsoft has spent more money on Windows dev than has ever been spent on Linux dev. I'm not so sure about that, if we only consider the kernel (everything else would be a lame comparison). Linux likely has had many more paid devs than the NT kernel for the last 10-15 years, if not more. > This is a fallacy I also don't think this is a fallacy. Yes, of course a large company has a big head and spending is generally much less directed and efficient than in smaller companies (big news). But, lots of money also tends to pay great talents. > that I see repeated about the quality of open products all the time. ... and I didn't mention quality anywhere. As for open source: Software has near zero initial cost, iterations are extremely fast compared to anything manufactured and software engineering is an abundant skill. Hardware has high initial costs, high manufacturing costs, iterations take a lot of time and HW design encompasses quite some areas with a much smaller pool of people being able to do it. Also, a massive company like Intel which sucks up talent all the time from the hiring pool has the resources to evaluate multiple avenues of optimization at the same time, pick what looks best, and iterate (which, pretty much, is what Intel has been doing ever since Sandy Bridge). Another example here would be Intel developing P4, a massive and staggering failure comparable to the PowerPC970 debacle (just bigger) -- and then pulling the Core arch out of the hat (which originates, guess what, from a different engineering team in a whole different branch of Intel -- again, resources!). What I do expect here is that some companies might think they can influence an arch early on by diverting resources to it, to maybe save some money in the future (by not paying ARM anymore and other synergetic effects I mentioned above), and perhaps in the hope of getting a product that outperforms ARM/the competition in some metric(s). (Also we have seen in the past in quite some instances that CPU design is a very delicate art and even pouring massive monies into it might actually not get you very far - see AIM/PowerPC [although it was quite successful in some niches] - or, on the other hand, that radically new architectures that might theoretically be better don't succeed, because you don't get the fab access, or tooling access, or software, see eg. Transputer and many related examples)

microcolonel 10y ago

FE310 appears to outperform every state-of-the-art official ARM core (and perhaps every architecture-licensee core) in its class, with maximum stable clock speeds also much higher. BooM could be described as beating Cortex A15 and matching Cortex A53 (granted without a tapeout to prove it, only simulations). Both of these designs are publicly available and under licenses which allow proprietary derivatives. In every category; die area, power dissipation, total throughput, licensing cost, lead time, design flexibility, code density, technical debt, academic buy-in; real RISC-V cores which have been made in silicon are right-now beating ARM cores. At this point, ARM has but two things going for it: legacy and design maturity. Once RISC-V designs are mature enough to be expected to run all general-purpose software correctly; there will be few other axes to compete on. RISC-V has an immense zero-day advantage in its clean, worldly design. I think it would be foolish to downplay the likelihood of great success.