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Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
- uncletaco 7y agoI wonder if this will contribute to the world having RISC-V laptops sooner rather than later.
- jimmaswell 7y agoWhy would we want RISC-V on laptops?
- sigzero 7y agoJust reading up on it, the big thing pushing this is that the instruction set is completely open source. That's why someone might want it. https://hackernoon.com/why-we-need-risc-v-f94e3929891b https://hackernoon.com/why-we-need-risc-v-f94e3929891b
- Nokinside 7y agoThe cost of licensing instruction set is very small part of licensing. High performance microarchitecture is never going to be open source. They cost hundreds of millions to design and the design stays relevant only 4-5 years.
- Taniwha 7y agoWhy not? a diverse ecosystem of silicon with some actual competition is going to help get us out of this US-centric intel/amd world where all laptops are essentially the same
- ummonk 7y agoIt appears likely that Apple will be transitioning to ARM for its laptops in the future so regardless we should start seeing architecture diversity in laptops.
- zamadatix 7y agoMicrosoft and Google have already mass marketed multiple iterations of ARM laptops (the latter to great success in certain spaces) but "2" is not much diversity. Power has remained an active player but not in the laptop/phone/mobile space (even still very niche in workstation). RISC-V will bring much needed diversity to spaces currently dominated by two titans.
- jimmaswell 7y agoFor even the top models? How can that be performant?
- cmiles74 7y agoMaybe it won't contain a vendor "management engine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims_that_ME_is_a_backdoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...
- gruez 7y agoMaybe, but I doubt it. It's there to support a bunch of features that companies want (eg. remote management, trusted computing, etc.). The reason why the consumer version has it is that most consumers don't mind, and having a seperate sku with it disabled/not present would cost extra. This won't change with RISC-V. You might be able to get a low performance part without it, but all the mainstream (ie. high performance) parts will have it.
- madez 7y agoIntel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. With RISC-V, it is reasonable to expect multiple vendors to provide CPUs. There is a very good case to expect non-backdoored chips.
- gruez 7y ago>Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. That's true, but the way they do that is in a way that requires minimal changes. In terms of the management engine, that means not including AMT module (software) but keeping the rest of the ME (hardware). After all, it also does some essential things like power management and the bootloader. Removing it completely would also mean re-implementing the essential functionality. The best you can hope for if you want to use mainstream parts is something like me cleaner where the management engine is only there for the boot, but is disabled afterwards. Something without an management engine would certainly possible, but would be limited to niche products like the librem.
- 7y ago
- Barrin92 7y agoif not for anything else why not simply for competition, more choice and lower prices?
- wmf 7y agoWhat OS would they run?
- AlexeyBrin 7y agoA Linux distro probably, at least initially.
- FullyFunctional 7y agoMostly likely, but Android is but a recompile away (sure, not so for 3rd party apps). Even today, with hardly any hardware, there's (to various degree of completion): Debian, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, and seL4.
- dahfizz 7y ago> sure, not so for 3rd party apps. Ideally, once there is a JVM that runs on riscv, those apps are ported for free. An openJDK port is underway. I have no idea how much work it would be for Android to port its APIs, but Google certainly has the manpower if this is something they want.
- FullyFunctional 7y agoI don't know why there would be _any_ porting involved. Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. The major pain points today are the JITs, which applies to Java and JavaScript in particular. There has been preciously little (public) progress on these.
- dahfizz 7y ago> Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. But the compiler (openjdk in this case) still needs to be ported, no? EDIT: I think we are talking about two different things. The Java compiler (which emits Java bytecode) should be ported for convenience but that is not necessary. The compiler which compiles the actual JVM into an executable doesn't need to be ported, but it does need to have support added for emitting riscv machine code.
- bhouston 7y agoI think that RISC-V has a long way to go to be actually competitive with ARM on a IPC basis. Although it is great to have more competition in the market I believe that this is more of a 5-10 year goal rather than distinctly near term.
- Taniwha 7y agoRISC-V is an instruction set - I think you're confusing that particular implementations of RISC-V (of which there are few yet)
- bhouston 7y agoBut none of them are competitive at all on an IPC basis right? Don't get me wrong, I would love a RISC-V chip that is competitive with the ARM chips in smartphones but I think we are quite aways away from it for the time being. RISC-V is most successful as microcontrollers who do not have to be state-of-the-art fast, they just have to work reliably.
- kinghajj 7y agoBOOM is close to Ivy Bridge IPC in one benchmark. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~celio/ https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~celio/
- atdrummond 7y agoUsing MHz as a divisor really benefits BOOM and extrapolating from IPC makes some assumptions regarding the future ability of the chip to scale to similar frequencies as Intel's product line. Assuming the best performing BOOM chip refers to the 2018 HotChips tapeout, that chip operated at 1.0 GHz. The lowest speed Ivy Bridge Core/Pentium (a design getting close to a decade old, FWIW) was 2.5 GHz. This means on a core-to-core basis Ivy Bridge is 2.7x more performant. This ignores the benefit of the additional core count of the Core series of Ivy Bridge procs. Today's 9900K is also around 40% more performant than the comparable Ivy Bridge (4960X). That would suggest the performance gains modern Intel design holds over BOOM is closer to 3.8x on a core-to-core basis. Being within an order of magnitude performance-wise is impressive given that BOOM is mainly a one-man show. That said, having about a quarter of Intel's present chips' performance doesn't strike me as particularly "close".
- coliveira 7y agoI am glad to have lower prices and more healthy competition
- StreamBright 7y agoIs there a comparison between RISC-V and Power? IBM recently published the POWER instruction set.
- HNcantBtrustd 7y agoWhenever I hear the horrors of the tradewar in a positive light, I wonder if this is the Russian propagandists in action. How can war be good? Delighting in the suffering of everyone?
- mensetmanusman 7y agoEvery ‘war’ that is not actually involving bloodshed can be good, because competition has been the spur of amazing human endeavors throughout history. Sometimes people need motivation to try something hard...
- Synaesthesia 7y agoTrade war is not war
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoThere is a legal/political artifact in this case: Intellectual property. If IP didn't exist, then this wouldn't be good news, because we would have always had a competitive market in the first place, we wouldn't have proprietary ISAs. This trade war just happens to interact with that artifact in a positive way: fostering competition in spite of IP.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoThe problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or don't require fancy graphics -- servers, network hardware, microcontrollers, etc. But it would be a tough call to put one in a phone, tablet, or laptop.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 7y agoGPUs have sort of plateaued except for the raytracing component. There are quite a few vendors, Mali from ARM, Adreno from Qualcomm, PowerVR from Imagination, NVIDIA's GeForce, AMD's Radeon, Intel's integrated stuff, and then there is a few more smaller players (what Matrox, Broadcom, etc.) I think there is room for an open source straightforward GPU based on the standard principles. Although maybe there is patent licensing between all the parties that I am not aware of.
- mmanfrin 7y ago> GPUs have sort of plateaued except for the raytracing component What? As far as I understood it, CPUs had plateaued outside of efficiencies, GPU power still follows Moore's. Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, whereas CPUs from 7 or 8 years ago are only marginally slower (SC) than modern ones.
- ksec 7y ago>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoMore like "Huawei seeks to survive in the future in spite of the US squeezing them. They want to believe these other chips will let them do that." I don't understand the tech well enough to know how much of a fairy tale or hope and a prayer strategy this is. But calling it "seeks independence" is some incredibly positive spin which makes me suspicious of the claims. If these other chips are so good, wouldn't you go ahead and migrate to them for the actual benefits rather than researching them as a backup plan?
- sacheendra 7y agoA one dimensional comparison like good or bad is not how these decisions get made. Current ARM based chips are good enough for current applications. They come with massive app support and a mature ecosystem. Given the risk of being kicked out of that ecosystem. The score tips in favor of this new technology.
- FullyFunctional 7y agoSoftware. There's tremendous inertia in apps which is what gave x86 an effective monopoly in the 90'es, even when superior options were available (hello Alpha). Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding) but it's obviously way less attractive than running running existing code.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoSo QWERTY keyboards all over again, basically.
- flmontpetit 7y ago"Literally every software and hardware market since computers became a commodity" all over again, you mean. They've always tended towards monopolies. IP law is harmful to society.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
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- gumby 7y agoWhat do they expect. The US tariff wall and embargo is essentially a subsidy that encourages local development. Without it it’s cheaper to continue to depend on US controlled designs. Essentially low tariffs make it hard for local industries to get themselves above the price floor. These parts aren’t much to get excited abOUT today but they’ve finally given China a reason to subsidize local efforts, resulting in the long term with an ecosystem that can take off the us design giants.
- Gibbon1 7y agoFew days ago someone posted a paper from 2002 talking about that with a quote from a 19th century US pol bitching about the British lowering tariffs in order to kick the ladder away. digging http://www.personal.ceu.hu/corliss/CDST_Course_Site/Readings_old_2012_files/Ha-Joon%20Chang%20-%20Kicking%20Away%20the%20Ladder-The%20%E2%80%9CReal%E2%80%9D%20History%20of%20Free%20Trade.pdf http://www.personal.ceu.hu/corliss/CDST_Course_Site/Readings...
- blackflame7000 7y ago"Essentially low tariffs make it hard for local industries to get themselves above the price floor." This applies to both countries.
- gumby 7y agoThe point is that it's asymmetrical. The US produces high value products (high tech bearings, specialized software), stuff whose value is lower than the cost of transport (paper) and extractive goods (mining and agriculture). Other countries are more competitive on the low end stuff. Look at electronics: yes, China has tons of people building phones, but Chinese companies get about $20 on each iPhone; other parts of the supply chain get dribs and drabs and Apple pockets a couple of hundred bucks, almost all of the profit. trying to do all that in the US wouldn't add much to the GDP and conversely would take people away from working on higher value goods. So for a wealthy country the tariffs not only don't help, they hurt. Conversely US restrictions raise the value of Chinese companies working their own way up the value chain. Before those restrictions were in place it simply wasn't worth designing, say, a new chip; that takes a long time and while you're doing so other companies are smoking you by selling low cost chips designed elsewhere. Essentially the US was sucking the oxygen out of their competitor's market...but these tariffs stop that. It's the same principle of why the US wouldn't want its NATO partners spending too much on defense: essentially bribing them to not have much military is cheaper than getting entangled in a future war on the continent. Again, trying to pressure them to spend more is a very expensive move in the medium and long term.
- Petrova 7y agoImagine the irony if Huawei turns into an open source company that is the best option for user privacy. Just by going with RISC-V they eliminate the issues with the Intel management engine. I'm curious what Huawei will do next.
- ohyes 7y agoThat seems... unlikely.
- panpanna 7y agoDoes it? Their first arm doc was extremely open. It is often used by academics for researching really low level stuff.
- jdnenej 7y agoTheir history with android is very poor. Their phones are next to impossible to physically open and they offer no way to unlock the bootloader but there are individuals who will charge you a fee to have the bootloader unlocked using their exploits.
- gok 7y agoBy moving away from ARM, mostly designed in the UK and with Japanese owners? Sounds like they're really just seeking general independence.
- detaro 7y agoThe ARM that is following US sanctions against Huawei due to its large presence in the US and reliance on what it says is "U.S.-origin technology"?
- jasoneckert 7y agoIt's hard to speculate what's going to happen in the end with the tech industry when there is turmoil - there are too many factors and actors at play. But, I, for one, enjoy watching it tremendously (it's like "soaps" for us tech folk).
- addicted 7y agoSo there are basically 2 possibilities. It is possible for Huawei, and Chinese companies in general, to build a successful alternative without using American technology (for the purposes of this post, I'm defining successful as equivalent to their American tech using competitors). It's not possible. What the actions on Huawei have done, however, is ensure that if that possibility exists, very significant chunks of Chinese resources will be devoted to finding it. It appears China had decided this wasn't completely necessary, and were happy to rely on Americans for software, and core hardware. But that is obviously not true anymore, and the biggest long term effect of these actions are Chinese state resources being poured into directly combating and threatening American tech's competitive position. And seeing that the tariffs and capricious action has not been limited to China, it won't even be surprising if some other nations join in to help, especially from the EU and/or India and Korea.
- Fr0styMatt88 7y agoI think this is actually a good outcome, at least from a standpoint of avoiding a technical monoculture (especially in hardware). It's probably also good for general innovation as a whole.
- erichocean 7y ago> without using American technology Eh, RISC-V was developed at UC Berkeley. In the United States.
- AsyncAwait 7y agoThe implication there was patented. Linux for example has been developed all over the world, yet am sure the administration would happily claim it's American as well, just because of where the Linux Foundation is located, but that doesn't matter as long as it's open.
- jsizzle 7y agoIt also shows how short sighted USA is with this. They’ve given China incentive to reduce their reliance on the US and give the US less leverage overall. China may set a damaging precedent here with regard to US power
- ryanmarsh 7y agoIs it just me or does this read like copypasta from a Chinese -> English translated press release? From TFA: In a similar vein, Huawei has launched MindSpore, a development framework for AI applications in all scenarios. The framework aims to help with three goals: easy development, efficient execution and adaptable to all scenarios. In other words, the framework should aid to train models at the lowest cost and time, with the highest performance per watt, for all use cases. Another key design point of MindSpore is privacy. The company says that MindSpore doesn’t process the data itself, but instead “deals with gradient and model information” that has already been processed.
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI looked for MindSpore and only found references to MindSpore Studio. Anyone have a link to a git repo and docs? I saw that it also supports CPUs in addition to their custom hardware. TensorFlow and Keras have such a large first mover advantage, the custom chips and MindSpore would have to be very efficient and inexpensive to make real inroads.