3 ms·

> Do we really want to be faced with a multiplicity of distinct ISAs? There exist excellent and free / open-source tools for dealing with this kind of inconven

by d_tr 6y ago

> Do we really want to be faced with a multiplicity of distinct ISAs? There exist excellent and free / open-source tools for dealing with this kind of inconvenience. Even then, is it worth it? IMO, yes, because screw having to pay and get blessings for the legal right to merely execute an instruction stream on a processor of your own design. However, the possible fragmentation issues are a concern, but mainly within the RISC-V ISA itself with all the extensions that will probably start popping up.

klelatti 6y ago
I worry about a 'tragedy of the commons' type situation emerging here. RISC-V isn't 'GPL' in any meaningful sense so the danger is that we effectively see a series of 'forks' by the most powerful SoC designers - they add their own instructions etc and use their designs to crowd others out. What if Apple and Samsung together forked ARMv8 added its own instructions and everyone started writing their code for that variant because of their market power? I understand why ARM isn't necessarily the most popular firm and why the fees / control aren't ideal but I do think its important to think through the full implications of any market change like this.
- megameter 6y ago
  It is sometimes said of the 21st century that it is an era of customization. If we take that notion as the gospel truth, there is no part of the computing stack that can survive as a stable, uniform standard, including the base architecture. But computing as a whole is resilient to such changes. Having a special hardware instruction is a competitive advantage if it's used, but it tends to exist as implementation detail and doesn't carry the weight of an end-user feature. A chip design can target some subset of applications, but software fallbacks are expected, and software developers increasingly don't attempt to optimize to the hardware, making it a commodity. In that light RISC-V arrives at a time where it's very unlikely to matter. A decreasing share of applications will need to look that deeply.

by d_tr 6y ago

klelatti 6y ago

I worry about a 'tragedy of the commons' type situation emerging here. RISC-V isn't 'GPL' in any meaningful sense so the danger is that we effectively see a series of 'forks' by the most powerful SoC designers - they add their own instructions etc and use their designs to crowd others out. What if Apple and Samsung together forked ARMv8 added its own instructions and everyone started writing their code for that variant because of their market power? I understand why ARM isn't necessarily the most popular firm and why the fees / control aren't ideal but I do think its important to think through the full implications of any market change like this.

megameter 6y ago
It is sometimes said of the 21st century that it is an era of customization. If we take that notion as the gospel truth, there is no part of the computing stack that can survive as a stable, uniform standard, including the base architecture. But computing as a whole is resilient to such changes. Having a special hardware instruction is a competitive advantage if it's used, but it tends to exist as implementation detail and doesn't carry the weight of an end-user feature. A chip design can target some subset of applications, but software fallbacks are expected, and software developers increasingly don't attempt to optimize to the hardware, making it a commodity. In that light RISC-V arrives at a time where it's very unlikely to matter. A decreasing share of applications will need to look that deeply.