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Very interesting and useful. However, does anyone have experience with obtaining RISC-V server hardware on a commercially useful scale, i.e. more than 1pcs? Ba
by corty 6y ago
Very interesting and useful.
However, does anyone have experience with obtaining RISC-V server hardware on a commercially useful scale, i.e. more than 1pcs? Back when ARM servers where all the rage, there were lots of announcements, but almost never products one could order. Is RISC-V any better in that regard?
- antsoul 6y agoFrom what I got, the future should look like : -You choose the RISC-V design first. -From that design, you choose the fab that will produce the design. Each fab has its own price and trustfulness.
- corty 6y agoMaybe, but that would mean building our own hardware. I don't think anyone here would be comfortable with that, we are not big enough for such an endavour to make any sense at all. We'd rather buy off-the-shelf hardware, preferably from a selection of vendors...
- fluffything 6y agoThe 3 big fabs that you'd like to use are fully booked until 2023 or so. So you kind of forgot the "wait 4 years" part.
- imtringued 6y agoSure, we will fab your design how many units do you need? We can manufacture 2000000 for you. Oh, you don't need that many? Is 250000 low enough?
- numpad0 6y agoBuying handful units at list price isn’t at business scale
- corty 6y agoYes. I just meant that when we tried to obtain a few ARM servers, the only quantity we ever got was "1 sample machine". Thus we couldn't even really try it out ourselves, let alone have customers do meaningful tests on a handful of machines. Of course in "a few datacenters full of"-like quantities there was just no chance of getting anything. And of course, for making our own hardware (you can get ARM chips, just not full systems) we don't have the expertise, size and will.
- guug 6y agoSure, but you need a handful of units to evaluate them properly. Availability of units is a huge concern and (imo) the largest barrier to boader adoption of non-x86 servers; ie, no sane person would hedge their operations on a single server vendor that can't reliably supply compatible units when needed. At least, not willingly.
- imtringued 6y agoYour product is worthless if nobody is using it.
- detaro 6y agoI don't think RISC-V servers are anywhere near that level of development.
- d_tr 6y agoI do not think there is anything to obtain yet. The only two designs that I am aware of and that are out-of-order are Berkley's BOOM and Alibaba's Xuantie 910. And then you also need a complete and standardized platform, i.e. chipsets, firmware interfaces, etc. There are also a few standard extensions, including "Packed-SIMD", "Vector" and "Transactional Memory" that are still in a draft state.
- eatbitseveryday 6y ago> Berkeley
- nl 6y agoCompetitive RISC-V general purpose servers are probably about 10 years off. Special applications will happen first. I'd note that ARM servers are finally becoming competitive in specific use-cases. The AWS Graviton2 CPU is useful for many apps.