3 ms·

I'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 c

by antpls 8y ago

I'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 ago
As 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 ago
  Not 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 ago
    I 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.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      > UNIX guys cutting down costs by outsourcing their development costs into Linux. Apparently people can't read.
benchaney 8y ago
They don't present any facts here. Just some idle speculation about hidden costs of Riscv.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
The 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.

by antpls 8y ago

rwmj 8y ago

As 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 ago
Not 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 ago
  I 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.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    > UNIX guys cutting down costs by outsourcing their development costs into Linux. Apparently people can't read.

benchaney 8y ago

They don't present any facts here. Just some idle speculation about hidden costs of Riscv.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago

The 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.