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I'm seriously hoping he gets on board a big RISC-V project eventually, and contributes to pull this baby off to the races.

by K0SM0S 7y ago

kick 7y ago
RISC-V already has more accomplished people than Keller working on it, and I don't think his presence is required for it to continue to get better. What RISC-V needs at this point is marketing and a company with a dedicated sales team, not technical competency.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I don't really know what you mean by “more accomplished people than Keller” but I sure do share your overview. My point was more that economies of scale happen with killer products (e.g. how CISC won over RISC back in the 90's, it wasn't about tech but about product, and as you say it falls down to sales and marketing). Somehow a guy like Jim got involved in some of the best scalers out there (AMD's x64, Apple's A chips, Tesla's self-driving AI, AMD's Zen, now something at Intel with 3D stacking most likely, and next...?) Here's to RISC-V, anyhow!
  - kick 7y ago
    I don't really know what you mean by “more accomplished people than Keller” but I sure do share your overview. Look at the SiFive team for starters. Anyway, here's to RISC-V!
  - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
    To me, David Patterson is the most obvious person who might qualify for that description. He (co-)wrote the book on computer architecture and how it relates to performance (Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach) and led development of RISC-I and RISC-II ("RISC-V" is a reference to this lineage; I believe other projects not officially bearing the "RISC" name were counted as III and IV).
    - dnautics 7y ago
      Patterson also worked on TPUv1 (iirc) and that wasn't so hot.
    - K0SM0S 7y ago
      He's a giant, no question about it. I just hope the people involved in RISC-V are collectively able, as an industry, to deliver the kind of fabrication process backbone funded by great products 'agressively' marketed that saw the victory of pretty much all standards — CPU instruction sets very much included. A combination of very applied engineering + shrewd business mindset.
      - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
        I think RISC-V is going to win for fundamentally the same reason that ARM won: it removes obstacles between product teams and processor cores. ARM didn't win by having the best instruction set design or the most advanced architecture, it won because licensing it was less of a hassle than licensing a different core/ISA. It's like ARM had a "buy now" button where everyone else had "contact sales" buttons. But extending that metaphor, RISC-V is "you don't need to click a button; it's already on your porch". I assume that RISC-V still has a gap (relative to ARM) between the ISA/HDL levels and getting to an actual tape-out. But I think SiFive et. al. can tackle it.
        hakfoo 7y ago
        I think there were a couple reasons ARM won: * ARM wasn't directly in the manufacturing business. This meant they weren't a supply chokepoint when demand scaled by a factor of thousands. Just take the IP core and fab it yourself! * They triangulated the market unexpectedly well. There was a definite gap in the market between "performance at any cost" big architectures (x86/Itanium/Power/PA-RISC/SPARC) and "Draws no current, but gets winded running the clock for a VCR" (6502/Z80/68HC11/Atmel/PIC) little ones. For a long time, this was filled by on an ad-hoc basis-- one-off designs for game consoles, set-top boxes, and ahead-of-their-time smart appliances. Most of these were closed, single-vendor, no-interoperability systems where "ease of integration" and "off the shelf tools" didn't really matter, so we had all sorts of bit players. It took the arrival of full-power handheld devices with third-party software support (PDAs and then smartphones) for a large demand to appear, and ARM was ready with a product line that fit the space well. Compare the alternative, a world where we had had x86-based Windows CE devices and eventually iPhones. Intel/AMD/VIA would have been scrambling to put together the diversity of custom designs these devices cried out for. It would have required a massive respin of their architectures (look how hard it was to get Atom into a phone-ready state, and even then it did poorly) and then backlogged their foundries.
- lliamander 7y ago
  Now that POWER is fully open, it will be interesting to see which RISC architecture becomes the x86 challenger (if either). RISC-V is eating up Intel (and ARM) from below, but POWER has the, well, power to compete at top of the line (before Zen 2 came out, anyway). The next gen POWER is supposed to be built on Samsung's 7nm process. If RISC-V wins, it will be because it has a better developer/enthusiast/hacker story, but if so it will take a longer time to get there. Either way, I hope for he sake of our infrastructure that an open standard wins out, and that we have enough competing manufacturers that we never have a repeat of Intel's utter dominance.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
    The open source community has been questionning RISC-V's openess lately [1]. While I wish they could correct that, maybe that could give POWER an edge. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RISC-V-Eyeing-POWER https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RI...
  - floatboth 7y ago
    POWER is basically only top of the line though, other than the relatively rare NXP QorIQ chips that were used in e.g. AmigaOne stuff. Most of the hype for RISC-V seems to be in tiny embedded stuff (e.g. WD's disk controllers) and academia (naturally). SiFive has finally made an out-of-order core, but I don't really see the market for big unix-capable RISC-V. RISC-V is really a royalty-free "MIPS in a trenchcoat", so expect it to be used where MIPS is used now. ARM is everywhere, from smartphones (unfortunately Qualcomm dominance, but Apple is kicking ass in performance) to AWS EC2 (in-house silicon!) to massive HPC clusters (Fujitsu A64FX is impressive, they use HBM2 RAM (!) to make a SIMD-capable CPU into something almost GPU-like in a way). AWS has basically ensured that ARM is the next ISA for servers :P
    - K0SM0S 7y ago
      I'm certainly not downplaying ARM's domination in general, but don't take this bit for granted: > AWS has basically ensured that ARM is the next ISA for servers :P These hyper-scalers (inc. Microsoft, Google, Alibaba...) will take a little bit of everything, because they generally can always find cookie-cutter workloads impeccably suited to any architecture, but also as industrial diversification, for R&D, etc. Like AMD, the presence of some ARM CPUs in the biggest datacenters says little about market forces, what matters is how many actual FLOPS are effectively handled by each vendor. I'm positive Intel still has the lion share, and the inflexion point in favor of AMD (nearest competitor) would be 2023 at best, more likely 2025-26 assuming Intel eventually catches up in price/perf/W. A reasonably heterogenous infrastructure is very good when you're an order of magnitude bigger than entire datacenters, or so I hear. I share your concern that RISC-V is currently largely confined to the MIPS space; and indeed it's a totally different ballgame to break into ARM's space, let alone x86 (but I don't see why RISC-V would seek the latter, especially considering POWER is up there).

I'm seriously hoping he gets on board a big RISC-V project eventually, and contributes to pull this baby off to the races.

by K0SM0S 7y ago

I'm seriously hoping he gets on board a big RISC-V project eventually, and contributes to pull this baby off to the races.

kick 7y ago

RISC-V already has more accomplished people than Keller working on it, and I don't think his presence is required for it to continue to get better. What RISC-V needs at this point is marketing and a company with a dedicated sales team, not technical competency.

K0SM0S 7y ago
I don't really know what you mean by “more accomplished people than Keller” but I sure do share your overview. My point was more that economies of scale happen with killer products (e.g. how CISC won over RISC back in the 90's, it wasn't about tech but about product, and as you say it falls down to sales and marketing). Somehow a guy like Jim got involved in some of the best scalers out there (AMD's x64, Apple's A chips, Tesla's self-driving AI, AMD's Zen, now something at Intel with 3D stacking most likely, and next...?) Here's to RISC-V, anyhow!
- kick 7y ago
  I don't really know what you mean by “more accomplished people than Keller” but I sure do share your overview. Look at the SiFive team for starters. Anyway, here's to RISC-V!
- 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
  To me, David Patterson is the most obvious person who might qualify for that description. He (co-)wrote the book on computer architecture and how it relates to performance (Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach) and led development of RISC-I and RISC-II ("RISC-V" is a reference to this lineage; I believe other projects not officially bearing the "RISC" name were counted as III and IV).
  - dnautics 7y ago
    Patterson also worked on TPUv1 (iirc) and that wasn't so hot.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    He's a giant, no question about it. I just hope the people involved in RISC-V are collectively able, as an industry, to deliver the kind of fabrication process backbone funded by great products 'agressively' marketed that saw the victory of pretty much all standards — CPU instruction sets very much included. A combination of very applied engineering + shrewd business mindset.
    - 0xcde4c3db 7y ago
      I think RISC-V is going to win for fundamentally the same reason that ARM won: it removes obstacles between product teams and processor cores. ARM didn't win by having the best instruction set design or the most advanced architecture, it won because licensing it was less of a hassle than licensing a different core/ISA. It's like ARM had a "buy now" button where everyone else had "contact sales" buttons. But extending that metaphor, RISC-V is "you don't need to click a button; it's already on your porch". I assume that RISC-V still has a gap (relative to ARM) between the ISA/HDL levels and getting to an actual tape-out. But I think SiFive et. al. can tackle it.
      - hakfoo 7y ago
        I think there were a couple reasons ARM won: * ARM wasn't directly in the manufacturing business. This meant they weren't a supply chokepoint when demand scaled by a factor of thousands. Just take the IP core and fab it yourself! * They triangulated the market unexpectedly well. There was a definite gap in the market between "performance at any cost" big architectures (x86/Itanium/Power/PA-RISC/SPARC) and "Draws no current, but gets winded running the clock for a VCR" (6502/Z80/68HC11/Atmel/PIC) little ones. For a long time, this was filled by on an ad-hoc basis-- one-off designs for game consoles, set-top boxes, and ahead-of-their-time smart appliances. Most of these were closed, single-vendor, no-interoperability systems where "ease of integration" and "off the shelf tools" didn't really matter, so we had all sorts of bit players. It took the arrival of full-power handheld devices with third-party software support (PDAs and then smartphones) for a large demand to appear, and ARM was ready with a product line that fit the space well. Compare the alternative, a world where we had had x86-based Windows CE devices and eventually iPhones. Intel/AMD/VIA would have been scrambling to put together the diversity of custom designs these devices cried out for. It would have required a massive respin of their architectures (look how hard it was to get Atom into a phone-ready state, and even then it did poorly) and then backlogged their foundries.
lliamander 7y ago
Now that POWER is fully open, it will be interesting to see which RISC architecture becomes the x86 challenger (if either). RISC-V is eating up Intel (and ARM) from below, but POWER has the, well, power to compete at top of the line (before Zen 2 came out, anyway). The next gen POWER is supposed to be built on Samsung's 7nm process. If RISC-V wins, it will be because it has a better developer/enthusiast/hacker story, but if so it will take a longer time to get there. Either way, I hope for he sake of our infrastructure that an open standard wins out, and that we have enough competing manufacturers that we never have a repeat of Intel's utter dominance.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  The open source community has been questionning RISC-V's openess lately [1]. While I wish they could correct that, maybe that could give POWER an edge. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RISC-V-Eyeing-POWER https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RI...
- floatboth 7y ago
  POWER is basically only top of the line though, other than the relatively rare NXP QorIQ chips that were used in e.g. AmigaOne stuff. Most of the hype for RISC-V seems to be in tiny embedded stuff (e.g. WD's disk controllers) and academia (naturally). SiFive has finally made an out-of-order core, but I don't really see the market for big unix-capable RISC-V. RISC-V is really a royalty-free "MIPS in a trenchcoat", so expect it to be used where MIPS is used now. ARM is everywhere, from smartphones (unfortunately Qualcomm dominance, but Apple is kicking ass in performance) to AWS EC2 (in-house silicon!) to massive HPC clusters (Fujitsu A64FX is impressive, they use HBM2 RAM (!) to make a SIMD-capable CPU into something almost GPU-like in a way). AWS has basically ensured that ARM is the next ISA for servers :P
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    I'm certainly not downplaying ARM's domination in general, but don't take this bit for granted: > AWS has basically ensured that ARM is the next ISA for servers :P These hyper-scalers (inc. Microsoft, Google, Alibaba...) will take a little bit of everything, because they generally can always find cookie-cutter workloads impeccably suited to any architecture, but also as industrial diversification, for R&D, etc. Like AMD, the presence of some ARM CPUs in the biggest datacenters says little about market forces, what matters is how many actual FLOPS are effectively handled by each vendor. I'm positive Intel still has the lion share, and the inflexion point in favor of AMD (nearest competitor) would be 2023 at best, more likely 2025-26 assuming Intel eventually catches up in price/perf/W. A reasonably heterogenous infrastructure is very good when you're an order of magnitude bigger than entire datacenters, or so I hear. I share your concern that RISC-V is currently largely confined to the MIPS space; and indeed it's a totally different ballgame to break into ARM's space, let alone x86 (but I don't see why RISC-V would seek the latter, especially considering POWER is up there).