4 ms·

A ton of ARM boards like this already exist. You can bring up most Allwinner chips with 100% open source code. The bootmask from for many have been dumped and d

by subway 9y ago

A ton of ARM boards like this already exist. You can bring up most Allwinner chips with 100% open source code. The bootmask from for many have been dumped and disassembled even. The trouble is they all suck in some slightly different way. Maybe only 1gb ram, maybe a bottleneck bus in front of your net or storage io. Graphics are the big pain point right now. Etnaviv/vivante is your only choice for free accelerated graphics, and you'll only find it in a few chips. Mali and PowerVR are all around, but have absurdly difficult to work with closed source drivers. The nicest oss-all-the-way-down arm socs are i.MX6, which is expensive and frankly old/slow. To be clear: riscv doesn't solve any of these concerns. That doesn't mean it isn't an amazing project.

greenhouse_gas 9y ago
So how will RISC-V help? Do ARM patents cost that much to license?
- Taniwha 9y ago
  If like WD you need 1B cores in your products each year .... and you're paying (number pulled out of thin air) 25c a core to ARM - you're saving $250M
- subway 9y ago
  RISC-V doesn't directly help with any of these concerns. But it is an alternative to ARM, and has a governance model that parties interested in open standards might be more willing to join. Right now, ARM CPUs on the low end have little standardization at the SOC level. They have a few cores from ARM, (what you think of as the main CPU, maybe a GPU, maybe a low end micro for power management, and a couple more for realtime tasks). Then you have the non-ARM IP in the form of image processors for cameras, video decoding, etc. The SoC mfg is responsible for gluing together all these parts, and every mfg has their own proprietary take on the process, meaning a different initialization sequence, different firmware layouts, etc. The SoC mfg's goal is to ship a product. It isn't to define a standard, and since there is no standard to follow, 'anything' goes. Because ARM costs enough that it isn't viable to do a SoC layout you aren't going to ship millions of the chip, academic research (where the seeds for standards are often planted) just doesn't happen.
  - greenhouse_gas 9y ago
    >Because ARM costs enough that it isn't viable to do a SoC layout you aren't going to ship millions of the chip, academic research (where the seeds for standards are often planted) just doesn't happen. Is it license or fab issues? I thought that license is $0.X per chip, so it shouldn't make a difference (license-wise) if you make Y chips or 100,000 * Y chips. Fab costs change by overhead, but how would RISC-V help there?
    - subway 9y ago
      It's a mix of upfront costs and per-chip royalties, with upfront costs for the IP being in the millions. Here's a somewhat accurate article on the topic: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how-arms-business-model-works/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...

by subway 9y ago

greenhouse_gas 9y ago

So how will RISC-V help? Do ARM patents cost that much to license?

Taniwha 9y ago
If like WD you need 1B cores in your products each year .... and you're paying (number pulled out of thin air) 25c a core to ARM - you're saving $250M
subway 9y ago
RISC-V doesn't directly help with any of these concerns. But it is an alternative to ARM, and has a governance model that parties interested in open standards might be more willing to join. Right now, ARM CPUs on the low end have little standardization at the SOC level. They have a few cores from ARM, (what you think of as the main CPU, maybe a GPU, maybe a low end micro for power management, and a couple more for realtime tasks). Then you have the non-ARM IP in the form of image processors for cameras, video decoding, etc. The SoC mfg is responsible for gluing together all these parts, and every mfg has their own proprietary take on the process, meaning a different initialization sequence, different firmware layouts, etc. The SoC mfg's goal is to ship a product. It isn't to define a standard, and since there is no standard to follow, 'anything' goes. Because ARM costs enough that it isn't viable to do a SoC layout you aren't going to ship millions of the chip, academic research (where the seeds for standards are often planted) just doesn't happen.
- greenhouse_gas 9y ago
  >Because ARM costs enough that it isn't viable to do a SoC layout you aren't going to ship millions of the chip, academic research (where the seeds for standards are often planted) just doesn't happen. Is it license or fab issues? I thought that license is $0.X per chip, so it shouldn't make a difference (license-wise) if you make Y chips or 100,000 * Y chips. Fab costs change by overhead, but how would RISC-V help there?
  - subway 9y ago
    It's a mix of upfront costs and per-chip royalties, with upfront costs for the IP being in the millions. Here's a somewhat accurate article on the topic: https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-how-arms-business-model-works/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7112/the-arm-diaries-part-1-h...