9 ms·
ARM: “RISC-V Architecture: Understand the Facts”
- littlestymaar 8y agoThe hn title could replace «Facts» with «FUD» since this is literally what this campaign is.
- rwmj 8y agoIt is rather desperate. ARM could easily head off RISC-V by releasing a few low end cores under an open source license, but instead they're being disrupted. Rather classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma.
- antpls 8y agoI'm a rather uninformed reader, and I would be interested to read about sources that say the facts presented here are wrong, rather than just read "it's a FUD campaign". At the end of the day, no camp rigoursly shared information
- rwmj 8y agoAs with all FUD campaigns, there's an element of truth. ARM does undoubtedly have a very large ecosystem and more features (RISC-V lacks hardware virtualization for example). But there are also loads of companies using and producing real RISC-V cores and all the major Linux distros are already shipping on RISC-V. The barrier to entry to RISC-V is far lower since you can quite literally download the cores off github and program them into just about any FPGA (there's even a version which works with an 8k-LUT FPGA that costs $10 in quantity). Or just fire up a qemu RISC-V VM at no cost at all. As with Linux & Windows servers c.1999, who would you bet on winning in the end?
- trasz 8y agoNot just Linux distros; FreeBSD supports RISC-V as well.
- pjmlp 8y ago> As with Linux & Windows servers c.1999, who would you bet on winning in the end? It was more about UNIX & Windows. Linux won on the servers thanks to majority of UNIX guys cutting down costs by outsourcing their development costs into Linux. Had Linux not gotten the money of IBM, HP, Compaq, SGI, Intel, Oracle, Sun, Google, ...., the outcome would have looked much different.
- rwmj 8y agoI was specifically referring to the MSFT FUD against Linux. > Had Linux not gotten the money of IBM, HP, Compaq, SGI, Intel, Oracle, Sun, Google, ...., the outcome would have looked much different. But these companies didn't spend that money because of a fluffy corporate love of the underdog. They wanted to "commoditize their complements". And the exact same desire will apply to the CPU, which is why software companies will want to do the same thing in future once there's a viable open source CPU (whether that is RISC-V or something entirely different).
- squarefoot 8y ago"Had Linux not gotten the money of IBM, HP, Compaq, SGI, Intel, Oracle, Sun, Google, ...., the outcome would have looked much different." Linux would win anyway. I've worked in the late 90s-early2k in places which were then already planning the move from proprietary Unix to Linux, some of them also in pretty critical contexts. Most of the companies you mention already had their own Unix: AIX, Digital Unix / Tru64, Irix, Solaris; they shoveled all that money into Linux (apparently against their own business) because they realized that selling products and services would pay in the long run a lot more than selling also the operating system, especially when the OSS competitor was gaining support every day. Soon or later that abundance in developers and testers would turn into less bugs, more features and faster response to vulnerabilities that no corporation in the world could equal.
- benchaney 8y agoThey don't present any facts here. Just some idle speculation about hidden costs of Riscv.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoThe nature of FUD is not that it's outright wrong, but that it's largely irrelevant and intentionally missing the point, and you can usually recognize that without knowing much about the subject matter. For example, when they write that licensing the ISA is only a small fraction of the total cost of designing a processor, that is correct. But they are simply ignoring the broader implications of a non-free ISA and its financial effects, and the fact that this fact in itself may actually depend heavily on their current business model. Think about how the free availability of Linux has changed how people can build software, and how that has brought down the cost of software considerably, and much more so than the licensing costs of a Windows install per server. Also, their argument is sort-of "you don't need competition because the price isn't that high", even though it obviously would be a lot higher if there were no competition. Similarly, it's not wrong that verification and validation of CPU designs is expensive. But (a) noone suggests that those people who are buying ARM chips now will do their own CPU designs in the future, and (b) ARM chips obviously also require expensive verification and validation, so you end up paying for that regardless where you buy a chip. So, again, simply intentionally missing the point. Also, a lot of it is obviously just speculation, such as "well, what if the new processor is less secure than our product?" Well, yeah, big if, tons of unjustified assumptions: Are their processors really that secure? Couldn't a new processor designed from scratch be much more secure than their accumulated cruft? Again, not factually incorrect, but highly misleading by implying unjustified assertions. That's what the "(U)ncertainty" in FUD refers to.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoHaha, that reads so much like Microsoft's FUD in the early 2000s targeting Linux ... so I guess we can conclude from that that ARM's assessment is that RISC-V is a viable alternative that's worth using and investing in?
- snvzz 8y agoARM is apparently and unsurprisingly scared shitless about the RISC-V threat.
- graycrow 8y agoThey may be scared and this is completely normal. What is not normal - it's the fact that there is a person placed high enough in the ARM's chain of command, who sanctioned this dumb page - like "oh, that's really nice - it will help us a lot, publish it".
- convolvatron 8y agomaybe the world would be better off if we treated marketing as a sunk cost and stopped encouraging them to actually try to control the narrative.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoThis page should be archived alongside the Halloween documents as a reminder of the endless FUD campaigns against FLOSS software/hardware.
- sillywindows 8y agoAre we sure this is published by Arm? The whois and certificates seem a bit anonymous.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- detaro 8y agoThe header tags reference a copy of the "infographic" hosted on arm.com: https://www.arm.com:443/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png?revision=c8e7b9ff-7eee-45b0-aedd-a6ebee15976d https://www.arm.com:443/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-in...
- slezyr 8y agoOk, looks genuine now, thanks for proofs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- legulere 8y agoI have to say that I’m surprised that it seems to be pretty factual. The main points seem to be that RISC-V is not there yet and that customization is expensive. I guess for most projects you currently use ARM processors ARM will make most sense for a while. RISC-V will probably slowly eat a growing piece of that market though over the next years to decades.
- Dylan16807 8y agoWhen it starts off saying there are "currently" no royalties, as if royalties could be added in the future, I'm not inclined to call it "pretty factual". Maybe "contains some facts, among other things". Also point 4 is pretty useless, and point 5 is basically nonsense. It's implying that you should avoid the higher costs of customizing by using Arm instead of just... not customizing.
- tzahola 8y agoCan't tell if parody, legit, or an amateur false flag.
- harias 8y agoCan somebody please verify the authenticity? Why didn't arm use a subdomain of arm.com?
- dchest 8y agoGood question. Domain is registered with wildwestdomains (GoDaddy), anonymized: Domain Name: RISCV-BASICS.COM Registry Domain ID: 2277459939_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.wildwestdomains.com Registrar URL: http://www.wildwestdomains.com Updated Date: 2018-06-20T21:54:44Z Creation Date: 2018-06-20T21:54:44Z Registry Expiry Date: 2019-06-20T21:54:44Z Registrar: Wild West Domains, LLC ... Registrant Name: Registration Private Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC Registrant Street: DomainsByProxy.com Hosted on Azure: Name Server: NS1-07.AZURE-DNS.COM Name Server: NS2-07.AZURE-DNS.NET Name Server: NS3-07.AZURE-DNS.ORG Name Server: NS4-07.AZURE-DNS.INFO SSL cert is from GoDaddy. This is very different from arm.com. At first sight, I'd assume it's fake. Link to arm.com though has GA tags for tracking: ?utm_source=riscv-basics.com&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=18.06_riscv-ds-eval-confidence_riscv_na_na_web_pg2956a1_02 HTML has: <meta name="server" content="ARMGSCD2" /> which matches arm.com <meta name="server" content="ARMBPCM1"> Of course, these can also be fake. But maybe it's real. EDIT: It's real: https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png?revision=c8e7b9ff-7eee-45b0-aedd-a6ebee15976d%22 https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr...
- rwmj 8y agoCompare: https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png?revision=c8e7b9ff-7eee-45b0-aedd-a6ebee15976d https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr...
- baybal2 8y ago"Get the facts"... sounds way to familiar...
- jchw 8y agoSome of the "facts" here are pretty weak. The "years of security expertise" is not really a feature I'd be proud of given the recent processor-level vulnerabilities that in fact, paint a very different picture about how traditional processor vendors treat security. Even if there is some validity here, this is in surprisingly poor taste. I've known people who have worked for ARM. I wonder what they think about this.
- cptskippy 8y agoHow would an open source processor be better from a security perspective? I might still be a little shell shocked from my attempts to setup a MythTV Box 10 years ago but this is what's running through my head: "Did you RTFM?" "Debain CPU doesn't have that issue." "Just disable the ALUs in firmware, they're not necessary in modern processors anyways." "That's been patched, just download processor v2.3.4.432 and send it to your FAB, they should spin you a new CPU in 8-12 months."
- justinjlynn 8y agoAll of that sounds better than: "Oh, our new processors don't have that issue. Trust us, pay me. Oh, you just bought one? Too bad."
- jchw 8y agoSome open source projects are different. A lot of them do not cater to end users directly. But if you want to talk about open source security, take a look at how OpenBSD handles issues; they definitely aren't messing around.
- jacknews 8y agoThese facts seem fairly true, it's a new thing and doesn't have much momentum yet. I don't think there are that many people yet considering risc V seriously for current commercial implementations, rather than keeping an eye on it for future projects, but I'm sure there will be once momentum builds.
- Iwan-Zotow 8y agohttps://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...
- MisterTea 8y agoI call shenanigans, this is a fake page. First off the page isn't coming from arm's own domain yet it appears to mimic the look and feel of the arm site. No cookie acceptance policy and the missing links from the bottom of the page are further proof.
- flyinghamster 8y agoNot to mention the domain's registration is anonymized.
- cpeterso 8y agowhois says arm.com is registered through Com Laude and hosted on Akamai while riscv-basics.com is registered through Wild West Domains and hosted on Azure. https://whois.domaintools.com/arm.com https://whois.domaintools.com/arm.com https://whois.domaintools.com/riscv-basics.com https://whois.domaintools.com/riscv-basics.com
- blauditore 8y agoYeah, WHOIS lists DomainsByProxy.com - why would they hide their name in the domain registration if they write "arm" on the header in big letters, linking to arm.com? This actually looks like a smear campaign against ARM.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oytis 8y agoBut the diagram is actually hosted by ARM. Maybe it's ARM wants to think us that RISC-V supporters launched a campaign against them \s
- Laaas 8y agoThis part however is hosted on ARM's own website: https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png?revision=c8e7b9ff-7eee-45b0-aedd-a6ebee15976d https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr...
- wsterling 8y agoThis is a marketing page with little if any information, how did it get voted up?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoThe information isn't in the text itself, it's in the fact that ARM feels like publishing this is a good idea. They don't publish such nonsensical marketing for competition they consider irrelevant.
- sligor 8y agowhat I read: RISC-V is a very serious competitor for ARM
- topspin 8y agoIndeed. We've arrived at the 'fight' stage of ignore, laugh, fight, win.
- graycrow 8y agoAssuming that this is not a fake - who is the target audience for a such page? They are not talking about baby diapers there, but CPU architectures. I just can't imagine that someone responsible for choosing a CPU architecture will base his/her decision on a page like this. Then why it exists? To show us that ARM is afraid of RISC-V? Ok then, message received.
- Fnoord 8y ago> Then why it exists? Propaganda ("FUD"). SEO.
- deepnotderp 8y agoYou think that all CPU architects and semiconductor company employees are elites who can't be fooled by marketing. You'd be surprised...
- flyinglizard 8y agoARM is playing a very, very dumb game here. Do they seriously think any prospective RISC-V user has not taken this information into account? Whomever goes on to design an ASIC probably knows what they are getting into well enough. ARM would be much wiser to embrace RISC-V early, spearheading this effort and bringing RISC-V users into their tools and ecosystem.
- Uberphallus 8y agoA friend works in ARM and was extremely surprised (negatively) when I shared this link with him RISC-V may, perhaps, compete in two fields with ARM: education, where ARM doesn't give a fuck, and hacker boards, which is a tiny market compared to smartphones, smarttvs and so on. There have been around 15 million Raspberry Pi (the most popular SBC) sold in 6 years. Samsung sold 321 million smartphones last year alone. Whoever is thinking today about replacing some production anything with a RISC-V is insane to begin with, but this campaign ups the insanity further.
- dragontamer 8y agohttps://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_strategy/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str... https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-western-digital-to-accelerate-the-future-of-next-generation-computing-architectures-for-big-data-and-fast-data-environments.html https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-... > Western Digital’s leadership role in the RISC-V initiative is significant in that it aims to accelerate the advancement of the technology and the surrounding ecosystem by transitioning its own consumption of processors – over one billion cores per year – to RISC-V. Western Digital is moving to RISC-V. I'd say ARM has begun to notice the shift and needs to begin damage control.
- 394549 8y ago> RISC-V may, perhaps, compete in two fields with ARM: education, where ARM doesn't give a fuck, and hacker boards, which is a tiny market Those seem like very similar markets to those that Linux started out with. AFAIK, Sun never ran FUD/attack ads against Linux, but this feels similar to a hypothetical world where they did so very early in 1993. I doubt FUD will ultimately be able to prevent the adoption of RISC-V, but it may be able to delay the inevitable for a few years.
- lokedhs 8y agoIf I recall correctly SCO did. At least they pointed out how much more stable they were than Linux. And SCO was much more vulnerable to Linux than Sun was. Linux could even run SCO binaries unmodified. And we know what happened to them later. And I say this as someone who used to work for a SCO distributor, and later Sun.
- cybervegan 8y agoScary! Scary! Don't go in there - it's SCARY! But scary for whom? For ARM maybe? Is it just me, or is this pure FUD?
- gruturo 8y agoIf this article is genuine (there are many comments arguing it might not be) I would consider it an excellent endorsement of RISC-V. If a company with an awesome engineering, like I consider ARM to be, is scared to the point of authoring some FUD, RISC-V has to be _really_ promising!
- redshirt 8y agoThis is an utterly stupid move by ARM...if it's legit. Looks like it's a different domain registry than all the other ARM websites...not sure why, but that seems a bit fishy.
- gruturo 8y agoIt might be the result of a PR firm doing something utterly inconsiderate and completely exceeding their mandate.
- TomVDB 8y agoWhen I search for "risc-v basics arm" in Google, this article comes up first as a paid Ad. So somebody is paying google to make this thing come up on top.
- delinka 8y agoCan you screenshot that and link to the screenshot? I don't see it marked as an ad.
- TomVDB 8y agoI wish I did. It doesn't come up like that anymore.
- chithanh 8y agoSomeone on reddit made a screenshot https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8xbqlv/arm_launches_facts_campaign_against_riscv_ie_fud/e22fnto/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8xbqlv/arm_launches_... https://imgur.com/a/U2XGVee https://imgur.com/a/U2XGVee
- deepnotderp 8y agoYes, it's from arm, who has a vested interest, yes it's in poor taste, and yes, it's stretching in some places, but it's not necessarily inaccurate...
- dtech 8y agoI do not understand the commotion either. As far as attack ads go, this keeps very close to the truth and points out legitimate concerns. This so far away from the early 00's Microsoft anti-Linux campagin that you can't even really call it FUD
- FullyFunctional 8y agoBecause it's fud. Each of the five points are either lies or stretching the truth, and is missing a key element: RISC-V allows people to innovate (on the implementation, not necessarily adding instructions to the ISA). To do this for Arm requires an architectural license which is insanely expensive (you can start many start ups for just this alone).
- DannyB2 8y agoAn important missing feature: something resembling "Intel Management Engine" Does ARM have this? Does RISC-V have this? If Management is good, then someone's Remote Management of your computer must be even gooder!
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoIDK... Everyone freaking out about how "disruptive" an open source core would be... You still need someone to place it on silicon (unless you want to waste most of your FPGA on a soft core) and you need someone to make peripherals which lets be honest is 80%-95% of what Cortex M-type embedded processors are doing at any given time. These seem like the major barriers that aren't solved by removing a licensing fee for the core. Maybe I just don't get it, but it seems a LONG way out for RISC-V powered top tier phones.
- _chris_ 8y agoLet's say I'm making an SoC and I need an always-on service processor. It's a waste of effort for me to make it myself, so I'll either license one or grab one off the internet, if I could trust it. In the past, people just threw a little bit of money to ARM and called it a day. But now, I could grab picorv32 or rocket for free off the internet. Both have been taped out in this capacity before, both speak standard bus interfaces, and the former has been fully(?) formally verified. Sure, it's not a resounding success story, but it helps me get my SoC to market sooner and at a lower cost (no need to even spend time negotiating with anybody).
- cwzwarich 8y ago> But now, I could grab picorv32 or rocket for free off the internet. Both have been taped out in this capacity before, both speak standard bus interfaces, and the former has been fully formally verified. What do you mean by "fully formally verified"? My understanding is that picorv32 has been verified by riscv-formal, and riscv-formal performs bounded model checking, which is not full formal verification unless you otherwise establish an upper bound on trace lengths that must be considered to find a bug.
- _chris_ 8y agoApologies, I may be speaking out of my $(# on that. I'm aware Clifford has used it to demonstrate formal method techniques, but I don't know the full extend to it. Caveat Emptor to anyone who decided to rush out and add it to their SoC. ;)
- bmcusick 8y agoLooking forward to "The Year of the RISC-V Desktop" articles. That's a joke, but I think Windows vs. Linux is the right reference frame here, assuming that RISC-V proves out. Those who want to roll their own and control their own destiny may go with RISC-V, while those who want a packaged solution will go ARM. And ARM will have to get better to compete. Western Digital has gone with RISC-V for a controller, because Western Digital is the kind of company that wants to commoditize its inputs so it can sell a packaged solution to its customers as cheaply as possible. I can also see Amazon or Google finding uses for RISC-V in their data centers. Phones ... I'm not so sure. Maybe Apple could go that way, as they're vertically integrated and already make their Ax chips in house. But the Android OEMs wouldn't unless Google leads the way.
- flurrything 8y agoJokes aside. Since February you can already buy RISC-V SoCs that run Linux... at pretty high prices, e.g., https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed costs 1000$ bucks and the expansion board costs 2000$... Still not practical for the masses, but not more expensive than similar extravagant architectures like PowerPCs (IIRC a PowerPC9 desktop system costs about 9000$ today). Someone joked that you could get a 30$ xeon system on ebay from a couple of years ago that would crush these on pretty much any benchmark, but who knows, maybe some day riscv chips will become cheaper and more powerful. What we are seeing in the market today are the very first such systems, from the very first vendors.
- bmcusick 8y agoOh, I'm sure that there will be hobbyists who do this. Just like there are people who run Arch on their home PC, or automate their house with Arduinos. The joke about "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is predicting mass consumer adoption. That doesn't seem too likely, unless someone like Apple or Google decides to move their stack over to silicon they can design and control in-house without need for ARM's long term support.
- dankiq 8y agohttps://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png?revision=c8e7b9ff-7eee-45b0-aedd-a6ebee15976d https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr... The article is not fake
- childintime 8y agoLet's not forget ARM sold out to Softbank right about when RISC-V was picking up steam (2016). As engineers they probably saw it coming. The bankers not so much.
- _chris_ 8y agoAnd then they started raising the licensing fees. Man what bad timing.
- _venkatasg 8y agoAm I the only one getting a blank page when I run it with an adblocker?
- dganousis 8y agoIt was a legit website - here's Arm's admission and explanation of intent. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ They sure did the RISC-V community a great service over the last 48 hours ....
- dganousis 8y agoIt was a legit website - here's Arm's admission and explanation after they took down the site today: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/