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Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt
- detaro 8y agonon-AMP link https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/
- poozer2 8y agoI don't know much about AMP, so could you tell me why or when a non-AMP page is preferable. I read the wiki on it, but it didn't clarify my question. Thank you.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoAMP doesn't render properly for us not on our phones.
- ars 8y agoIt worked fine here, on Firefox desktop.
- gcb0 8y agogood for you, running javascript everywhere. With adblocker, or uMatrix, or noScript, etc, you have to white-list each site. Trivial but annoying.
- a1369209993 8y agoWhy would you whitelist a rag^Wnews site like theregister.co.uk?
- Symbiote 8y agoFor a news site, it has a fairly low number of trackers, and it's in the EU so GDPR applies.
- ars 8y ago> good for you, running javascript everywhere. I'm not. I have noscript installed. I whitelist certain things, plus anything run by the site itself (which is automatic, I don't have to configure it per-site). I rarely have to change it anymore.
- a1369209993 8y agoBoth versions render okay for me (firefox), although the non-AMP version is scrunched into a newpaper column that only uses half the window width; do you have noscript disabled?
- poozer2 8y agoGot it. Thanks
- gcb0 8y agothe main difference is that AMP pages are served directly from google servers and they get your info directly. Non AMP pages are served from random companies servers, and they have to inject google analytics via a script tag. The only wining move is not to play.
- dang 8y agoThanks, we changed to that from https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_websi....
- ggm 8y agoARM holdings, is one of those stories which somebody in history of science, economics, telecommunications should write up. Amazing outcomes. I feel sad that industry went to an IPR model which says 'nobody except geniuses works in the UK, we send this to fab lines elsewhere' but as a model, it totally worked.
- yuhong 8y agoThe current debt-based economy encourages this kind of behavior. I am more familiar with the US, but I think UK is not much better at this point. The worst was probably things like Rambus (not long after US DRAM manufacturing declined).
- TorKlingberg 8y agoThe physical fabs are a separate for good reasons. ARM's problem is that the capture such a small portion of the value. Companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD and Apple are also fabless, but they get a big chunk of the profits.
- makomk 8y agoThis also seems like it'd be RISC-V's problem too. ARM is, from what I understand, pretty cost-competitive - they're not a big fat high-profit behemoth ripe for disruption like say Intel. As it stands, I think the only companies that can save money with RISC-V are the ones with enough volume, staff, and specialised needs to take their chip design entirely inhouse without using the services of companies like SiFive and who also don't need compatibility with the existing software ecosystem.
- sverige 8y agoI have been a big fan of the RISC-V efforts. Arm's attack is actually heartening in the sense that it confirms the perceived threat from RISC-V is real. This is a moment on the path that makes me realize real progress is being made for RISC-V. The development of new technology seems to go so slow while it's happening; it's only in hindsight that it seems it's always and inevitably been this way. Still a long way from running OpenBSD on a 17" laptop with nothing but open source hardware inside, but it's a nice moment.
- waterhouse 8y agoIllustrating with the cliche... they ignore you they laugh at you they fight you <======= you win Now, for something substantial to say... I was looking into computers that can run heavily parallelized grep, and I looked at Adapteva's 16-core Parallella and their 1024-core Epiphany thing, which I think are based on RISC-V (possibly an extension thereto) (EDIT: I'm wrong, see below). It seems that the sole engineer of Adapteva had "left Adapteva in January [2017] to take a position as a program manager at DARPA", and that's the last blog post from the company's website. So... Is anyone working on anything like that, that is currently available or close to available?
- _chris_ 8y agoAdapteva did not use RISC-V. Andreas Olofsson said that, if there was another version, he would probably use RISC-V. [http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/why-i-will-be-using-the-risc-v-in-my-next-chip/ http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/why-i-will-be-using-the...]
- vidarh 8y agoI don't know of anyone doing something similar. GreenArrays is the closest I'm aware of in terms of number of cores, but their cores are far more minimalistic. XMOS Xcore is another one that is similar-ish. One of the problems Adapteva kept facing, and that I think XMOS did too (and that's caused their change in focus to specifically market voice processing solutions rather than focus on their chips), is that they're suited for a very specific nice: Larger CPUs are way better for things that need high single-core performance and are hard to decompose. GPUs are way better for anything that's mostly single-instruction multiple-data. That is, anywhere where you have a small number of instruction streams doing the same two large arrays. Things like Epiphany and XMOS Xcore do have some appeal in really low power applications, but they'll do best in cases where you have multiple fundamentally divergent instruction streams (lots of branching). Even then, you need enough cores that you can't just pick a bigger CPU and timeslice. Conceptually it really appeals to me, but ever since the days of the Transputer, we've struggled to decompose problems well enough to make many-core designs like Epiphany compete well with ever-faster single-core performance and now coupled with GPU's to slice away the SIMD type problems. I'm still a fan, and have two Parallelas, and find it really sad that he wasn't able to get more traction, as I think you need to get it to an inflection point with more RAM per core and more cores per chip (the Epiphany V might have done that if it had become commercially available, or e.g. on a PCIe card) to allow people to more realistically find the right problems to solve on them. Part of the challenge is that unlike for GPUs, there are no problems that are really screaming out for this architecture, especially not as single core performance for CPUs have skyrocketed, and you can compensate for the lower number via multithreading. For Epiphany type architectures to make sense you need problems where slow-ish single thread performance can be compensates by an ability to run far more in parallel and/or where deterministic latency for communication that is easy to reason about can compensate (e.g. for Epiphany you can relatively easily count "hops" to know how many cycles accessing the memory of any given other core will take, so if you're careful you can use that to do lock-free memory accesses across cores).
- waterhouse 8y agoHeh heh. I paused partway through the article to look at web.archive.org to see exactly what ARM's website had said, and was going to post it here, and then I checked and saw that the article links to the archived version too. Props to the Internet Archive and to Chris Williams. For reference: http://web.archive.org/web/20180710130206/https://riscv-basics.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20180710130206/https://riscv-basi...
- antpls 8y agoNo one proved ARM was actually behind this. It could be a scam.
- philpem 8y agoSee my post upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17505091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17505091
- Yetanfou 8y agohttps://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr... Enough proof all by itself unless they claim arm.com has been 'hacked' or abused through an insider job.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- justinjlynn 8y agoGood. That site was typical tone deaf marketing rubbish.
- bencollier49 8y agoWow, I was very critical of the UK government's decision to allow the sale of ARM, but perhaps the time was right.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y agoThis just reeks of backtracking on behalf of Arm's management imho. "Blame us, our hardworking staff (who are just like you) are not to blame." It's a half-decent marketing strategy but it's not fooling me.
- TomVDB 8y agoIf it’s not fooling you, what do you think really happened? That the hardworking staff (engineers like you and me) were strongly in favor of this poor website and collaborated on it to make it happen? To me, internal protests by rank and file sound extremely likely, TBH.
- pertymcpert 8y agoYou think the CPU designers were involved in this? Fool.
- dang 8y agoIf you continue to post uncivil comments to HN, we're going to have to ban you. Would you please re-read the rules and use this site as intended? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- koosnel 8y agoIf ARM didn't attack RISC-V I would not even know about them. Going to read about them now.
- jf- 8y agoSame here. Looks like an interesting project, but looks like it’s predecessors sadly came to nothing.
- rwmj 8y agoRISC-V is substantially different in scope than things like OpenRISC and SPARC. They are not designing a single core, they are designing specifications and allowing multiple suppliers (both open and proprietary) to create implementations. Also the standards cover much more than just the core. And they're working with Linux distros to make sure the software ecosystem is there too.
- snvzz 8y agoBut they didn't have the sort of backing RISC-V has. Just glance at RISC-V foundation member list, or RISC-V workshop minutes. It's got serious traction.
- nickik 8y agoThat's somewhat of a strange argument. The predecessors were highly successful and influential academic projects. The simply never had the idea/motivation to try to move that stuff into the real world. All of this stuff also now profits from the change/slowdown in Moors law.
- antpls 8y agoTo me, it looks like that site was not created by ARM, no one was able to prove ARM created it, and it could be just a scam to attack ARM's public image. That's bad journalism right there.
- philpem 8y agoFair point... except ARM were kind enough to leave the main infographic on their own website as of two minutes ago. https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infographic.png https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-infogr... Probably fair to assume it's sanctioned by ARM if it's on arm.com. Unless they play the "we were hacked" card.
- waterhouse 8y agoGood find. Also, the article does say it talked to at least one person at ARM. It would require that either Chris Williams made stuff up and wasn't caught by anyone else at The Register (he is Editor-In-Chief, but I hope someone still checks his work), or the ARM spokesperson and anyone else Williams talked to was lying. "Arm told us it had hoped its anti-RISC-V site would kickstart a discussion around architectures, rather than come off as a smear attack. In any case, on Tuesday, it took the site offline by killing its DNS. “Our intention in creating a webpage to offer key considerations around commercial RISC-V based products was to inform a lively industry debate," an Arm spokesperson told The Register."
- antpls 8y agoHonestly, for someone who doesn't know TheRegister, even that article looks like a scam to me. The linked image stored on the ARM server from the comment above is a way stronger proof imho. Edit : The picture could have still been hijacked from its initial purpose by a malicious actor. Maybe ARM didn't planned to use that picture the same way it was presented on the RISC related domain.
- vertex-four 8y ago
- _nalply 8y agoIt's too late. I call Streisand effect. At least I didn't know about RISC-V. Yesterday I binged on the specification. Thank you Arm for enlightening me.
- CalChris 8y agoWhen RISC-V was first coming out, the Berkeley folks published a position paper: Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.html ARM published a response: The Case for Licensed Instruction Sets http://www.linleygroup.com/mpr/article.php?id=11268 Unfortunately that argument is behind a pay wall. Perhaps it should have been titled The Licensed Case for Licensed Instruction Sets.
- thrillgore 8y ago"To hear why ARM is great, you need to pay a fee first." I can't help but laugh at how ARM is responding to RISC-V. They're giving the architecture great publicity. Has Softbank forgotten how to run its subsidiaries?
- writepub 8y agoTo be fair, the decision makers, i.e. asic architects,designers from top cop firms, most likely aren't having out at HN, it banking on public opinion here. ARM can bloody well do as it pleases with little impact on business Where RISC-V does have a chance is in getting adopted by a company with a long term Outlook and huge shipments. Ideal customer is Samsung, who use arm in everything from DRAM/NAND to smartphones. If they can prove it commercially on one product line, maybe SD cards, they can shake it to others over there next decade.
- thrillgore 8y agoARM did an incredible job in that puff piece legitimizing RISC-V.
- Annatar 8y agoThe mnemonics of RISC V are terribly thought out when compared to OpenSPARC or the legendary MC68000. Particullarly galling is the choice of dst, src rather than src, dst (although that could be solved by using UNIX®️ version of as(1)). Terribly thought out design internally. Not that ARM is much better, mind you.
- kps 8y agoIf Intel has taught us anything about ISAs, it's that having a shitty one doesn't much hurt. If ARM has taught us anything about ISAs, it's that starting with a nice one doesn't mean it won't end up a mess. (There exist 32-bit ARM implementations with precisely zero opcodes in common.)
- microcolonel 8y agoOddly enough, these are among the least concerning, least permanent aspects of the specs; not sure why they bother you so much either. It's frankly not a whole lot different from MIPS, except lacking exposed delay slots, and a number of instructions that turn out not to have been used much. My biggest issue is with how many instruction bytes it can take to load an arbitrary 64-bit immediate without an IC, but that can be gotten around by using an IC.
- M_Bakhtiari 8y agoThey should have just copied http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.1.28.153048.268.html http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.1.28.153048.268.html and replaced 'Intel' with 'ARM' and 'AMD' with 'RISC-V'.
- DannyB2 8y agoI remember when Microsoft seemed unassailable. I remember Get The Facts. I remember the arguments that "free" software must not be any good. That nobody stood behind it. That is was only free if your time was worth nothing. And on and on. Now Microsoft's best days are behind it. Microsoft is openly embracing Linux. Who would have ever believed SQL Server would run on Linux. Or that Microsoft would create a Linux personality on Windows called "Windows Subsystem for Linux". Microsoft even admitted (sorry I don't have a link) that the reason for this embrace was to bring developers back. Linux is now in everything that is not a desktop PC. From wristwatches to mainframes and everything in between. To the point: This now seems to be happening with open source RISC hardware.
- pmarreck 8y agoApple used to mock Microsoft. Maybe people should finally figure out that if you have to mock your perceived competitor, you should probably take them seriously instead.
- pwinnski 8y agoApple mocked Microsoft as an underdog ("I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"), and it worked. They don't mock Microsoft now.
- jakear 8y agoWhy does that put Microsoft’s best days behind it? A less cynical person might look at what you’ve just said and say Microsoft’s best days are ahead.
- tw04 8y agoExactly this. There are only two ways I can find to read that: 1. You think that Microsoft is dying, and embraced open source as a last ditch effort to right the ship. If this is your opinion (OP) - you must just be an MS hater. They are CRUSHING it, and I haven't seen this much goodwill from their enterprise customers since the dot-bomb of the early 2000s. People are actually proud and excited to use their products again. 2. You think that embracing open source is going to kill them. In which case you just argued against your own premise. Either way, I don't see how their "best days are behind them".
- jdblair 8y agoThe first casualty of RISC-V will not be ARM, it will be MIPS. MIPS CPUs are the current choice for low-cost embedded systems that run a Linux kernel, from home routers (where MIPS has nearly 100% penetration) to low-end set-top-boxes. I expect MIPS will be dropping their licensing costs even more to compete at RISC-V matures and becomes a better option.
- TomVDB 8y ago> ... from home routers (where MIPS has nearly 100% penetration) to low-end set-top-boxes. I don't think that's true anymore for new installations. A lot of those home routers and set-top boxes are using Broadcom chips, and they switched from MIPS to ARM years ago.
- jdblair 8y agoBroadcom still ships new MIPS SOCs, like the BCM7231. Context: I work on set top boxes at Netflix.
- urmish 8y agohttps://www.arm-basics.com https://www.arm-basics.com was created in response.
- thelastidiot 8y agoHistory doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. Microsoft used similar tactics to derail its OSS competition. Look what happened.