4 ms·

At the end of the day, RISC-V will only succeed if I can buy a board where I can attach some SATA drive, a monitor and keyboard/mouse the same way people buy so

At the end of the day, RISC-V will only succeed if I can buy a board where I can attach some SATA drive, a monitor and keyboard/mouse the same way people buy some ITX board. This might be tough to hear for people discussing the ins and outs of RISC-V and why is so much better than x86 or ARM and the big name sponsors don't make it any better with the usual tight hugs and lullabies. But you need to put it in the hands of the people just like "the PC", otherwise it will be a pet project waiting to be forgotten by everybody other than the nostalgic ones.

abelsson 9y ago
There's gazillions of embedded processor cores in every device you own. Your SSD, network card, phone, motherboard, router, TV, modem, car, fridge, you name it all have multiple processor cores running some piece of firmware you never see. RISC-V has a pretty good value proposition for those: an open standard with no licensing costs with a rapidly maturing software ecosystem. To say that RISC-V will only succeed if you can attach a monitor to it only betrays a very narrow view of where processors are actually used.
- pjc50 9y ago
  ... most of whom are already using ARM. Intel - Intel - tried to compete in the embedded market and has recently quietly withdrawn several of its products. It's a tougher market than it sounds, and it's also more conservative than you'd expect.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Is that because it's that hard or they bet against ARM with its style of ecosystem?
    - pjc50 9y ago
      I think a combination of things, really. They never scaled down properly to really low end devices. The Intel systems had poor peripherals for some reason with high latency. They didn't really grasp the detail of what was needed for either the "maker" or industrial markets. And of course it wasn't a licensable IP.
      - nickpsecurity 9y ago
        Great summary. I could see that doing them in.
  - abelsson 9y ago
    True, many are indeed using ARM (in house designs are also more popular than you might think in deeply embedded SoCs), but a lot of companies would love to be able to throw out ARM due to licensing cost & hassle, or at least have a viable option in RISC-V to throw at ARM at the bargaining table.
  - ant6n 9y ago
    Intel is expensive, and not very power efficient in tiny chips. ARM is much cheaper and more efficient. RISC-V is similar to ARM, but even more cheaper.
  - shakna 9y ago
    nVidia are actively investing in RISC-V, which gives them a fairly good entry point into this market. Its a decent start.
  - petra 9y ago
    Intel didn't really try. You know who did really try ? espressif, with their famous ESP32. Or the startups: indie-semi, who sell mcu's built as lego's from multiple dies, affordably! which allows them to do custom-design and semi-custom design of mcu's per customer , while offering a large library of standard mcu's. Or terechip, who built a chip packaging process who can handle dies orders of magnitude smaller than current systems - opening possibilities for far cheaper mcu's and other simple chips. Or even ambiq-micro, which created a way to design mcu's that take ~10x(?) less power by enabling transistors to work on an extremely low supply voltage. This is how you compete with entrenched competitors. By doing something they cannot do. And Intel ? their fab doesn't even fit mcu's(no flash on logic processes, not good fit for analog). They had no advantage, no differentiation( maybe besides their neural network, a feature that didn't seem to attract customers). How did they expect to win ?
    - anderspitman 9y ago
      I'd say the ESP8266 is famous. ESP32 is still pretty new
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      Its almost as if they expect that just putting chips into a market makes that market have to buy it, almost as if they have gotten to used to not needing to compete. How could a chip vendor that has thoroughly cornered a few major market segments and might be considered to have some amount of monopoly status ever get into such situation?
- PedroBatista 9y ago
  That metric of success will never be achieved if you don't win the heart and minds of "regular folks" and remember, to "make" a phone, router, TV or fridge you first need to plug your keyboard somewhere. Don't try to conquer ARM doing what ARM has done, time doesn't go back and the small world of embed big wigs will ignore you.
Symmetry 9y ago
That what you need to make RISC-V a popular success. But really, it's already a success in a research context. I really wish something like it had been around when I was doing my thesis and by all accounts lots of researchers are using it as a base design that can be modified in various interesting ways. And there are lots of successful architectures out there that don't go into PCs. On the low end there's AVR, at the high end there's MIPS, and then there's ARM that's sort of eating everything. ARM started out as a desktop but it spend a long time as an embedded only processor before returning to popular consciousness. If RISC-V takes over cell towers or NAS boxes or robots or flying cars or whatever it could be quite successful without ever penetrating popular consciousness.
ant6n 9y ago
There are not many options to buy an ARM board where you can attach a SATA drive and monitor. They are pretty recent, and pretty expensive. Yet ARM is very successful.
glibgil 9y ago
> At the end of the day, RISC-V will only succeed if I can buy a board Maybe it will succeed regardless https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI... > NVIDIA will use RISC-V processors in many of its products > We are contributing because RISC-V and our interests align
- PedroBatista 9y ago
  And that's exactly my point, if some NVIDIA exec has some bad night's sleep there goes your success the next morning. These big players are only in this because they are afraid of missing out and have enough bucks to burn, when one of those things stop to happen, bye bye RISC-V.

abelsson 9y ago

There's gazillions of embedded processor cores in every device you own. Your SSD, network card, phone, motherboard, router, TV, modem, car, fridge, you name it all have multiple processor cores running some piece of firmware you never see. RISC-V has a pretty good value proposition for those: an open standard with no licensing costs with a rapidly maturing software ecosystem. To say that RISC-V will only succeed if you can attach a monitor to it only betrays a very narrow view of where processors are actually used.

pjc50 9y ago
... most of whom are already using ARM. Intel - Intel - tried to compete in the embedded market and has recently quietly withdrawn several of its products. It's a tougher market than it sounds, and it's also more conservative than you'd expect.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Is that because it's that hard or they bet against ARM with its style of ecosystem?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I think a combination of things, really. They never scaled down properly to really low end devices. The Intel systems had poor peripherals for some reason with high latency. They didn't really grasp the detail of what was needed for either the "maker" or industrial markets. And of course it wasn't a licensable IP.
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      Great summary. I could see that doing them in.
- abelsson 9y ago
  True, many are indeed using ARM (in house designs are also more popular than you might think in deeply embedded SoCs), but a lot of companies would love to be able to throw out ARM due to licensing cost & hassle, or at least have a viable option in RISC-V to throw at ARM at the bargaining table.
- ant6n 9y ago
  Intel is expensive, and not very power efficient in tiny chips. ARM is much cheaper and more efficient. RISC-V is similar to ARM, but even more cheaper.
- shakna 9y ago
  nVidia are actively investing in RISC-V, which gives them a fairly good entry point into this market. Its a decent start.
- petra 9y ago
  Intel didn't really try. You know who did really try ? espressif, with their famous ESP32. Or the startups: indie-semi, who sell mcu's built as lego's from multiple dies, affordably! which allows them to do custom-design and semi-custom design of mcu's per customer , while offering a large library of standard mcu's. Or terechip, who built a chip packaging process who can handle dies orders of magnitude smaller than current systems - opening possibilities for far cheaper mcu's and other simple chips. Or even ambiq-micro, which created a way to design mcu's that take ~10x(?) less power by enabling transistors to work on an extremely low supply voltage. This is how you compete with entrenched competitors. By doing something they cannot do. And Intel ? their fab doesn't even fit mcu's(no flash on logic processes, not good fit for analog). They had no advantage, no differentiation( maybe besides their neural network, a feature that didn't seem to attract customers). How did they expect to win ?
  - anderspitman 9y ago
    I'd say the ESP8266 is famous. ESP32 is still pretty new
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    Its almost as if they expect that just putting chips into a market makes that market have to buy it, almost as if they have gotten to used to not needing to compete. How could a chip vendor that has thoroughly cornered a few major market segments and might be considered to have some amount of monopoly status ever get into such situation?
PedroBatista 9y ago
That metric of success will never be achieved if you don't win the heart and minds of "regular folks" and remember, to "make" a phone, router, TV or fridge you first need to plug your keyboard somewhere. Don't try to conquer ARM doing what ARM has done, time doesn't go back and the small world of embed big wigs will ignore you.

Symmetry 9y ago

That what you need to make RISC-V a popular success. But really, it's already a success in a research context. I really wish something like it had been around when I was doing my thesis and by all accounts lots of researchers are using it as a base design that can be modified in various interesting ways. And there are lots of successful architectures out there that don't go into PCs. On the low end there's AVR, at the high end there's MIPS, and then there's ARM that's sort of eating everything. ARM started out as a desktop but it spend a long time as an embedded only processor before returning to popular consciousness. If RISC-V takes over cell towers or NAS boxes or robots or flying cars or whatever it could be quite successful without ever penetrating popular consciousness.

ant6n 9y ago

There are not many options to buy an ARM board where you can attach a SATA drive and monitor. They are pretty recent, and pretty expensive. Yet ARM is very successful.

glibgil 9y ago

> At the end of the day, RISC-V will only succeed if I can buy a board Maybe it will succeed regardless https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDIA-Sijstermans.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Tue1345pm-NVIDI... > NVIDIA will use RISC-V processors in many of its products > We are contributing because RISC-V and our interests align

PedroBatista 9y ago
And that's exactly my point, if some NVIDIA exec has some bad night's sleep there goes your success the next morning. These big players are only in this because they are afraid of missing out and have enough bucks to burn, when one of those things stop to happen, bye bye RISC-V.