4 ms·

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

by 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.

by K0SM0S 7y ago

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.