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It's no secret that NVIDIA is involved with RISC V. And don't forget Intel v Ampere (the company, not the NVIDIA chip). Intel is facing incredible competition.

It's no secret that NVIDIA is involved with RISC V. And don't forget Intel v Ampere (the company, not the NVIDIA chip). Intel is facing incredible competition. Once a crack appears in the server market and Arm rushes in, Intel will be in a very, very bad situation. Especially with 100,000+ employees compared to NVIDIA's 13,000. EDIT: Downvotes? Really?

gnulinux 6y ago
If they produce competitive CPU on RISC-V that'd be very interesting. I'd like to see a competition between ARM and RISC-V chips, so that ARM is not the monopoly in that niche market (high-end non-x86 chips). I think it's very unlikely though, if not impossible. Seems more logical to produce ARM.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  RISC-V chips have tended to run a bit cooler than ARM given comparable performance class, microarchitecture and fabrication device node. However it remains to be seen if this advantage will be preserved, especially as more RISC-V instruction extensions get standardized (vector instructions, packed SIMD, bit-level ops are all on schedule, plus a grab-bag extension for JIT hardware acceleration) and as ARM64 implementations improve.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Citation?
lmeyerov 6y ago
Their gain in risc-v may be more about making life hard for Intel (anti-competitive) and avoiding patents etc in gpu, than not actually wanting to go head to head on CPU revenue. Similar but weaker to why Google did Android (Apple phone monopoly might hurt selling ads).
CountSessine 6y ago
A typical GPU has a bunch of small microcontrollers on it, usually Cortex-M’s. Those need to be licensed. I wonder if Nvidia’s interest in RISC-V is just to replace those microcontrollers?
- klelatti 6y ago
  Indeed, RISC-V has mainly been as replacement for Falcon cores in GPUs so far. They evaluated vs Cortex A-53 through rather than Cortex-M. https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_...
jandrese 6y ago
I'm personally not terribly bullish on RISC V currently. All of the advantages have to be weighed against "it's not x86_64". ARM processors at least have tons of smartphone people working out the bugs and random weirdness. With RISC V you're the one on the bleeding edge, and will be for a long time. Plus if you're looking at the medium-long horizon you have to consider the possibility that the chips will stagnate or die out entirely and you'll be forced to abandon them anyway. Everybody wants to wait until there have been some people working with the technology at scale and working out he bugs, finding problems, fixing the docs, populating StackExchange, etc... In order to get people to make the leap you need to offer them something significantly better than the current offerings so they'll be willing to do the extra work. If you are offering marginal power efficiency improvements that is not going to cut it.
mercer 6y ago
> EDIT: Downvotes? Really? I was so close to actually upvoting you, and then I had to go and downvote... and by this point you were back in the black, so to speak. It's baffling to me how smart people like yourself, knowing the HN rules or at least being able to read them, still complain about downvotes. I really don't get it.
- mercer 6y ago
  Downvotes!? Really!?

gnulinux 6y ago

If they produce competitive CPU on RISC-V that'd be very interesting. I'd like to see a competition between ARM and RISC-V chips, so that ARM is not the monopoly in that niche market (high-end non-x86 chips). I think it's very unlikely though, if not impossible. Seems more logical to produce ARM.

zozbot234 6y ago
RISC-V chips have tended to run a bit cooler than ARM given comparable performance class, microarchitecture and fabrication device node. However it remains to be seen if this advantage will be preserved, especially as more RISC-V instruction extensions get standardized (vector instructions, packed SIMD, bit-level ops are all on schedule, plus a grab-bag extension for JIT hardware acceleration) and as ARM64 implementations improve.
- klelatti 6y ago
  Citation?

lmeyerov 6y ago

Their gain in risc-v may be more about making life hard for Intel (anti-competitive) and avoiding patents etc in gpu, than not actually wanting to go head to head on CPU revenue. Similar but weaker to why Google did Android (Apple phone monopoly might hurt selling ads).

CountSessine 6y ago

A typical GPU has a bunch of small microcontrollers on it, usually Cortex-M’s. Those need to be licensed. I wonder if Nvidia’s interest in RISC-V is just to replace those microcontrollers?

klelatti 6y ago
Indeed, RISC-V has mainly been as replacement for Falcon cores in GPUs so far. They evaluated vs Cortex A-53 through rather than Cortex-M. https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_...

jandrese 6y ago

I'm personally not terribly bullish on RISC V currently. All of the advantages have to be weighed against "it's not x86_64". ARM processors at least have tons of smartphone people working out the bugs and random weirdness. With RISC V you're the one on the bleeding edge, and will be for a long time. Plus if you're looking at the medium-long horizon you have to consider the possibility that the chips will stagnate or die out entirely and you'll be forced to abandon them anyway. Everybody wants to wait until there have been some people working with the technology at scale and working out he bugs, finding problems, fixing the docs, populating StackExchange, etc... In order to get people to make the leap you need to offer them something significantly better than the current offerings so they'll be willing to do the extra work. If you are offering marginal power efficiency improvements that is not going to cut it.

mercer 6y ago

> EDIT: Downvotes? Really? I was so close to actually upvoting you, and then I had to go and downvote... and by this point you were back in the black, so to speak. It's baffling to me how smart people like yourself, knowing the HN rules or at least being able to read them, still complain about downvotes. I really don't get it.

mercer 6y ago
Downvotes!? Really!?