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RISC V: A new blueprint for microprocessors challenges the industry’s giants
- mikece 7y agoI have an off-topic rant: I know it's "RISC FIVE" and not "RISC VEE" but as long as companies use letters to represent numbers it's my opinion they forfeit the right to complain that people aren't saying it right. Apple finally gave up and changed Mac OS "ex" to macOS; everyone else should follow suit.
- leggomylibro 7y agoI'm not sure it would be less confusing to name the ISA 'RISC' instead of 'RISC-V'. The 'R' in 'ARM' stands for 'RISC'.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoRISC is a generic term for ISAs with few instructions (in comparison to CISC ISAs).
- loeg 7y ago"RISC-5"
- DannyB2 7y agoIncrement the letter V by three positions and call it RISC-Y.
- jecel 7y agoDone: https://github.com/pulp-platform/riscv https://github.com/pulp-platform/riscv
- sircastor 7y agoBut then went on to call the iPhone 20 "iPhone X". And then switched back to Arabic numerals with the iPhone 11. Not to mention the "Plus" vs "Max" and all the other naming convention mismatches. Anyway, I agree with you.
- ken 7y agoiPhone XR is the worst. The "X" is a number, the "R" is a letter. I just can't see it as anything but "ex-are".
- abacadaba 7y agopretty sure the only people that call it ten-are are apple store employees
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoand that's only because tim cook will haunt their dreams if they don't
- ncmncm 7y agoI always say "risk-vee", and everybody knows what I mean. I also say "macosix" and "windos" (and used to say "solarix") as generic alternatives to commercial trademarks. Marketing departments can only propose pronunciation, they cannot dictate it, and they have no right or power to prevent inventing synonyms for the trademarks they control. They also have no authority over verbs, so e.g. "googling" is a generic term right out of the gate. There won't be a RISC-VI, so it doesn't matter that it means "5" to some people.
- rjsw 7y agoThe roman numbers were not really used for RISC 3 and 4, (SOAR and SPUR), only for RISC I and RISC II whose development overlapped.
- andrekandre 7y agointerestingly enough, the “v” in risc-v also means “v” as in vector [1] > and so we named it RISC-V. As one of our goals in defining RISC-V was to support research in data-parallel architectures, the Roman numeral ‘V’ also conveniently served as an acronymic pun for “Vector.” [1] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p... ———- so maybe in a way “vee” isn’t so inappropriate after all ^_^
- ci5er 7y agoSome people persist in calling "GIF", "jif", so whaddayagonnado?
- tasty_freeze 7y agoI pronounce it with the hard "g", and I'd happily ignore the few people that pronounce it with the soft "g", except that the guy who invented the format intended it to be pronounced "jiff".
- ci5er 7y agoYes. Being old, I remember. Well, considering that the "G" stood for "Graphics" and that "Graphics", in my native American English has a hard-g, I'm just going to declare the author of the format to be a troglodyte and go on from there. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - many of us tech-types are troglodytes and misanthropes and lack a classical education)
- samatman 7y agoI insist on the pronunciation "jayfeg" for JPEG, for the same reason.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoDo you also pronounce 'giraffe' and 'giant' with a hard "g"?
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/fFw5T http://archive.is/fFw5T
- pabl0rg 7y agoI’m surprised the Economist doesn’t know ARM is British!
- xiaodai 7y agoBought by softbank
- CalChris 7y agoWith major design centers in Austin (A76) and Sophia-Antipolis (A53) as well as Cambridge.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIt isn't anymore - it became Japanese a couple of years ago.
- ksec 7y agoChris, would you still consider, Jaguar, Bentley, Land Rover British? Because I think ownerships changes with time, but most of these brand, thinking, management are still very much British.
- chrisseaton 7y agoBut this isn't an article about corporate culture - it's an article about the nationality of the company which owns the IP. > are built around designs, known as instruction-set architectures (isas), which are owned either by Intel, an American giant, or by Arm, a Japanese one Who owns the ARM IP? A Japanese company. Not a British one. If you asked me if ARM has a British history and possibly culture, then yes (it certainly pays like a British company!) But that wasn't the context - the context was who effectively owns the IP. So what do you think is more likely? The Economist are mistaken about the history of the company, or they were using a different context, the one they actually make explicit in the article?
- 7y ago
- m0zg 7y agoGentle reminder: you can buy dual core RISC-V chips today for $9, FPU, DSP, and TPU included, with WiFi onboard if you buy a module: https://kendryte.com/ https://kendryte.com/. It won't run Linux (no MMU), but it will run FreeRTOS and TensorFlow Lite, straight from their GitHub.
- jtl999 7y agoThere's uclinux, but I don't know how well it works (seems abandoned) and if there are other issues with it running on above mentioned RISC-V core.
- copperx 7y agoIt's not clear from the website that you can buy a module easily. Do you have to buy them in bulk?
- m0zg 7y agoYou can buy them on Adafruit in the form of a device with battery, display and camera (but no wifi). Modules can be bought from Seeed or other usual Chinese places. No "bulk", you can even buy a single module. This, IMO, is one of the most exciting things I have seen in the embedded hardware space in years. At least all that Bitcoin money ended up producing something of value (the company that makes the chip stated out manufacturing bitcoin mining ASICs). https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAIX-I-module-WiFi-version-1st-RISC-V-64-AI-Module-K210-inside-p-3206.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAIX-I-module-WiFi-versio...
- 7y ago
- known 7y ago"Alibaba, an e-commerce giant based in Hangzhou, announced its first RISC-V chip in July"
- no1youknowz 7y agoCoreteks did a really nice video on Risc V. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KW4t42SZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KW4t42SZk
- caniszczyk 7y agoConsider joining and supporting the RISC-V Foundation! https://riscv.org https://riscv.org
- miohtama 7y agoWhat did make RISC-V a game changer? Why did not any open source chip enjoy such a success before?
- justicezyx 7y agoTiming A lot of small things added up A strong team
- jasonwatkinspdx 7y agoIt came out of Berkeley, and David Patterson contributed to it. That gave it a lot of initial clout. Darpa gave them early funding as well. And to some extent, I think the timing was just right vs people's frustrations over ARM.
- deepnotderp 7y agoTiming (trade wars, ending days of Moore's law, intels incompetence as of late), marketing (ucb/Stanford), few outright dumb decisions (e.g. no branch delay slots), money (DARPA), industrial support (nvidia, western digital, esperanto etc.)
- colejohnson66 7y agoWhy is no branch delay slots a bad thing?
- magicalhippo 7y agoYou read that wrong. GP said branch delay slots are a dumb thing, and the RISC V doesn't have it. More details on Wikipedia[1], and there's some nice answers as to why it's a bad idea these days on SO[2]. To summarize, the branch delay slot optimization makes exception handling and debugging much more complicated, doesn't bring much added performance if you have a deep pipeline, and modern branch prediction can render the the branch delay slot optimization moot anyway. It should be said that it wasn't necessarily a dumb thing back in the days, but rather that it's a dumb thing on a modern architecture. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_slot#Branch_delay_slots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_slot#Branch_delay_slots [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54724410/why-is-the-branch-delay-slot-deprecated-or-obsolete https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54724410/why-is-the-bran...
- azinman2 7y agoFor better or worse, this will become a basis that the semiconductor industry will heavily shift to homegrown chips in China. As problematic as Intel maybe, it still is a major source of cash, talent, and jobs. That will be eroded over time.
- microcolonel 7y agoThe PRC still largely does not manufacture or design semiconductors. RISC-V is popular in that young industry because it is credible and meets their criteria, and that value is similar elsewhere (particularly in India). > For better or worse... If the world would let the PRC gain a lead in semiconductors, it would be an unequivocal moral failure; I say this with great personal warmth for Chinese people. The world is a more grotesque and unfree place with every gain of the CCP.
- lnsru 7y agoChina has all the resources to lead in semiconductors. How can you stop this? Companies are being happily sold to Chinese investors all the time: Kuka, Putzmeister, Volvo, etc. Geely slowly takes over German carmakers: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-daimler-geely-electric/daimler-to-develop-smart-brand-together-with-geely-idUSKCN1R90NG https://www.reuters.com/article/us-daimler-geely-electric/da... Just wait couple decades...
- microcolonel 7y ago> Just wait couple decades... This is why I'm not just waiting, I'm getting richer, and I will continue not to do business or politics benefitting the CCP whenever possible. That's all anyone can do. You can't help but lose if you give up before starting. If things go well, I can do more, maybe go help secure trade secrets in Taiwan, or document CCP controlled forign land and infrastructure purchases; if not, at least I don't see a coward in the mirror.
- rusk 7y agoAs quixotic as this all may sound, I genuinely appreciate this kind of candour about motivation. It's quite rare, more often to see these kinds of actions justified in terms of specious economic or technical arguments. It's as if people have become afraid of admitting that personal morality drives some of their decisions.
- ur-whale 7y agoRISC-V is, among other things, a single shining ray of hope that we might actually be able to build a truly secure computing platform from the ground up instead of the backdoor-riddled stacks we have today.
- skybrian 7y agoMaybe, but I don't see why vendors making RISC-V chips are inherently more trustworthy? There are lots of dodgy vendors building standardized parts. It seems like they'd be easy to counterfeit?
- DethNinja 7y agoWe might hope that more competition will mean it will be harder to install backdoors but other than that there is no guarantees. Assuming that USA, Russia, and China are not hidden allies then we might be able to buy risc-v manufactured chips from other countries to prevent domestic spy agencies from accessing private data, but then there is no guarantee that USA, Russia, and China are not allies. Perhaps they share data with each other at similar capabilities to Five Eyes. At the worst case we got some open source chip design that will constantly evolve. Perhaps we might be able to print such CPU chips at home but that is decades away.
- traverseda 7y agoCould you use side-channel power analysis to ensure a chip is on-spec?
- zaarn 7y agoNo, the backdoor can use some activation mechanism on chip to avoid drawing power when not in use, then the additional power draw will be so low that it's essentially undetectable. Tbh you'd have a hard time since either you're trying to measure a few milliwatts in a very noisy environment (either very low wattage, so various effects dominate, or high wattage, where your equipment will quickly get very very expensive).
- O5vYtytb 7y agoI don't buy the argument that having a bunch of vendors extend the ISA makes it more secure. I think we would end up with an ecosystem with a lot of custom extensions and functionality that will end up exposing more attack surfaces and that would make it difficult to know if your device is affected or not.
- lbotos 7y agoYou are highlighting the risk of fragmentation causing security problems. I think that's valid. I think a lot of people are talking about "closed source" security as in nation-state level actors and "backdoors": https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-now-you-too-can-disable-intel-me-backdoor-thanks-to-the-nsa.html https://www.csoonline.com/article/3220476/researchers-say-no...
- person_of_color 7y agoAnyone hiring an ARM refugee willing to work on RISC-V?
- mindentropy 7y agoI too having been asking around. Did not have much luck. Most of the requirements are in chip design. Software contribution is done by the open source community. Corporations are contributing to open source but the team size is very small.
- person_of_color 7y agoHave you tried SiFive?
- mindentropy 7y agoI have tried but I don't see software vacancies. Most are for hardware verification and validation requirements. I don't they are interesting in hiring for remote positions.
- brucehoult 7y agoMost open-source software is written by people being paid to do it, and at SiFive we are expanding the software team as well as the hardware side. Ex-ARM people are certainly welcome and may recognize a few people when they get to the office(s) :-)
- thepra 7y agoI wonder where's AMD... did they omit it?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- als0 7y agoAMD aren’t part of the RISC-V foundation.
- fithisux 7y agoMaybe we need a new blueprint for devices and run away from the existing bloated blobby drivers.