10 ms·

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone ha

And there you have it. Perhaps the greatest thing to happen to RISC-V since the invention of the FPGA :-). I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. Regarding the federal investment in FOSS thread that was here perhaps CPU architecture would be a good candidate.

dragontamer 6y ago
RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs < $1 and powers billions of gizmos. For me the ARM ecosystem's biggest win is that it scales from really small (M0/M0+) to really usefully big (A78) and has many points between those two architectures. I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Not quite 48-pin QFP chips, but 257-pin embedded is still smaller than Rasp. Pi. (Just searched what NXP's newest Power-chip is, and its a S32R274: 2MB 257-pin BGA. Definitely "embedded" size, but not as small as Cortex-M0) To be honest, I don't think that NVidia/ARM will screw over their Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M0+ customers over. I'm more worried about the higher-end, whether or not NVidia will "play nice" with its bigger rivals (Apple, Intel, AMD) in the datacenter.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      The FS32R274VCK2VMM appears to be the cheapest in this series; Digi-Key have it for $30, NXP has it for "$13 @ 10K". This is for a 200MHz part. https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R274VCK2VMM/FS32R274VCK2VMM-ND/7645581 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R2... The two related devkits list for $529 and $4,123: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-programmers/evaluation-boards-embedded-mcu-dsp/786?k=S32R274 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-... -- Those processors make quite a few reference to an "e200", which I think is the CPU architecture. I discovered that Digi-Key lists quite a few variants of this under Core Processor; and checking the datasheets of some random results suggests that they are indeed Power architecture parts. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=-8%7C685%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928&quantity=0&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The cheapest option appears to be the $2.67@1000, up-to-48MHz SPC560D40L1B3E0X with 256KB ECC RAM. Selecting everything >100MHz finds the $7.10@1000 SPC560D40L1B3E0X, an up-to-120MHz part that adds 1MB flash (128KB ECC RAM). Restricting to >=200MHz finds the $13.32@500 SPC5742PK1AMLQ9R has which has dual cores at 200MHz, 384KB ECC RAM and 2.5MB flash, and notes core lock-step. -- After discovering the purpose of the "view prices at" field, the landscape changes somewhat. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=143%7C100399%2C143%7C105872%2C143%7C114552%2C143%7C114561%2C143%7C140510%2C143%7C147811%2C143%7C153451%2C143%7C160669%2C143%7C182367%2C143%7C213330%2C143%7C77976%2C143%7C79202%2C143%7C84100%2C143%7C85683%2C143%7C90674%2C143%7C94618%2C143%7C95635%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928%2C-8%7C685&quantity=1&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The SPC574S64E3CEFAR (https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf) is 140MHz, has 1.5MB code + 64KB data flash and 96KB+32KB data RAM, and is available for $14.61 per 1ea. The SPC5744PFK1AMLQ9 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf) is $20.55@1, 200MHz, 2.5MB ECC flash, 384KB ECC RAM, and has two cores that support lockstep. The MPC5125YVN400 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf) is $29.72@1, 400MHz, supports DDR2@200MHz (only has 32KB onboard (S)RAM), and supports external flash. (I wonder if you could boot Linux on this thing?)
  - na85 6y ago
    I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm too cheap to buy an oven :(
    - Ecco 6y ago
      You’re supposed to drag-solder those. Look it up on YouTube, it’s super easy. The hardest part is positioning the chip, but it’s actually easier than with an oven, because you can rework it if you only solder one or two pins :)
      - na85 6y ago
        Wow, just looked up a video and some guy did an 0.5mm pitch chip pretty darn quickly. Thank you!
        Ecco 6y ago
        You’re welcome! Also, flux. Lots of it. Buy some good one, and use tons of it. Then clean the hell out of your PCB!
      - IshKebab 6y ago
        There's an even easier way than drag soldering - just solder it normally, without worrying about bridges. You can put tons of solder on it. The use some desoldering braid to soak up the excess solder. It will remove all the bridges and leave perfect joints.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pcb-for-48-qfn-or-48-tqfp/57383 https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pc... can help. I have hand soldered STM32s to this adapter (use flux, a small tip)
    - foldr 6y ago
      A cheap toaster oven or hot air tool works fine for these. Or, as others have said, a regular soldering iron with lots of flux.
  - awill 6y ago
    the war is over. Arm has won. That dominance will take a long time to fade. AWS and Apple's future is Arm.
- darksaints 6y ago
  OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it. In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and redistribution of software is the status quo.
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.
    - darksaints 6y ago
      Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because speculative execution got them 80% of the way there without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out, speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and patching its security vulnerabilities has set back processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like a good idea again. We should have made those compiler improvements decades ago.
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        NVidia Volta: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf Each machine instruction on NVidia Volta has the following information: * Reuse Flags * Wait Barrier Mask * Read/Write barrier index (6-bit bitmask) * Read Dependency barriers * Stall Cycles (4-bit) * Yield Flag (1-bit software hint: NVidia CU will select new warp, load-balancing the SMT resources of the compute unit) Itanium's idea of VLIW was commingled with other ideas; in particular, the idea of a compiler static-scheduler to minimize hardware work at runtime. To my eyes: the benefits of Itanium are implemented in NVidia's GPUs. The compiler for NVidia's compiler-scheduling flags has been made and is proven effective. Itanium itself: the crazy "bundling" of instructions and such, seems too complex. The explicit bitmasks / barriers of NVidia Volta seems more straightforward and clear in describing the dependency graph of code (and therefore: the potential parallelism). ---------- Clearly, static-compilers marking what is, and what isn't, parallelizable, is useful. NVidia Volta+ architectures have proven this. Furthermore, compilers that can emit such information already exist. I do await the day when other architectures wake up to this fact.
Koshkin 6y ago
The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.
- gumby 6y ago
  Because of this transaction? I’m sure this deal will have absolutely no impact on apple’s deal with ARM. Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely has played with it internally) but they have enough control of their future under the current arrangement that it will be a long long time before they feel any need to switch — 15 years at least.
  - acomjean 6y ago
    Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards. This could change.
    - gumby 6y ago
      This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple’s POV) years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don’t know the internal details of course just the public ones so can’t say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the bridge while the problem was unfolding. Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I suspect the latter, as I’d imagine he’d be more dispassionate than Jobs. In any case I seriously doubt nvidia could, much less would benefit from cancelling Apple’s agreement.
      - TomVDB 6y ago
        > ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I've seen this argument made before. It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.
xigency 6y ago
> I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. I understand what you're saying and this seems to be the prevailing pattern but I really don't understand it. ARM could easily be a standalone company. For some reason, mergers are in.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it's board of director's didn't (doesn't) know? In my experience companies merge when they are forced to, not because they want to. I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern. [1] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2015 https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-re...
  - xigency 6y ago
    I don't have any specific knowledge of the ARM sale but I've seen other mergers. Clearly, if a buyer is willing to pay a premium for shares, it's because they believe the company is worth that premium. If the shareholders were optimistic, they might consider that as a signal of the company's underlying value and choose not to sell. Sometimes activist shareholders will pressure a company to sell, like in the case of the Whole Foods sale to Amazon. Jana Partners owned ~8% and they motivated Whole Foods to look for buyers. They dumped their shares after the sale was announced and before it was executed. Whether that was the best for the other 92% of shareholders, the company's employees, and its customers is another question entirely. My question is really outside of that. There will always be banks, investors, and companies that are motivated to consolidate and integrate companies to be increasingly competitive to the point of being anti-competitive. What is the counter force that helps maintain moderately sized companies that are profitable on their own?

dragontamer 6y ago

RISC-V still seems too ad-hoc to me, and really new. Hard to say where it'd go for now. I know momentum is currently towards ARM over POWER, but... OpenPOWER is certainly a thing, and has IBM / Red Hat support. IBM may be expensive, but they already were proven "fair partners" in the OpenPOWER initiative and largely supportive of OSS / Free Software.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
I would love OpenPOWER to succeed. I just don't see the 48 pin QFP version that costs < $1 and powers billions of gizmos. For me the ARM ecosystem's biggest win is that it scales from really small (M0/M0+) to really usefully big (A78) and has many points between those two architectures. I don't see OpenPOWER going there, but I can easily see RISC-V going there. So, for the moment, that is the horse I'm betting on.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Not quite 48-pin QFP chips, but 257-pin embedded is still smaller than Rasp. Pi. (Just searched what NXP's newest Power-chip is, and its a S32R274: 2MB 257-pin BGA. Definitely "embedded" size, but not as small as Cortex-M0) To be honest, I don't think that NVidia/ARM will screw over their Cortex-M0 or Cortex-M0+ customers over. I'm more worried about the higher-end, whether or not NVidia will "play nice" with its bigger rivals (Apple, Intel, AMD) in the datacenter.
  - exikyut 6y ago
    The FS32R274VCK2VMM appears to be the cheapest in this series; Digi-Key have it for $30, NXP has it for "$13 @ 10K". This is for a 200MHz part. https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.nxp.com/part/FS32R274VCK2VMM https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R274VCK2VMM/FS32R274VCK2VMM-ND/7645581 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nxp-usa-inc/FS32R2... The two related devkits list for $529 and $4,123: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-programmers/evaluation-boards-embedded-mcu-dsp/786?k=S32R274 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/development-boards-kits-... -- Those processors make quite a few reference to an "e200", which I think is the CPU architecture. I discovered that Digi-Key lists quite a few variants of this under Core Processor; and checking the datasheets of some random results suggests that they are indeed Power architecture parts. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=-8%7C685%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928&quantity=0&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The cheapest option appears to be the $2.67@1000, up-to-48MHz SPC560D40L1B3E0X with 256KB ECC RAM. Selecting everything >100MHz finds the $7.10@1000 SPC560D40L1B3E0X, an up-to-120MHz part that adds 1MB flash (128KB ECC RAM). Restricting to >=200MHz finds the $13.32@500 SPC5742PK1AMLQ9R has which has dual cores at 200MHz, 384KB ECC RAM and 2.5MB flash, and notes core lock-step. -- After discovering the purpose of the "view prices at" field, the landscape changes somewhat. https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/embedded-microcontrollers/685?FV=143%7C100399%2C143%7C105872%2C143%7C114552%2C143%7C114561%2C143%7C140510%2C143%7C147811%2C143%7C153451%2C143%7C160669%2C143%7C182367%2C143%7C213330%2C143%7C77976%2C143%7C79202%2C143%7C84100%2C143%7C85683%2C143%7C90674%2C143%7C94618%2C143%7C95635%2C506%7C342439%2C506%7C342440%2C506%7C342441%2C506%7C342442%2C506%7C342443%2C506%7C342444%2C506%7C342445%2C506%7C342446%2C506%7C342447%2C506%7C342448%2C506%7C342449%2C506%7C342450%2C506%7C342451%2C506%7C342452%2C506%7C342453%2C506%7C342454%2C506%7C342455%2C506%7C342472%2C506%7C431926%2C506%7C431928%2C-8%7C685&quantity=1&ColumnSort=1000011&page=1&pageSize=25 https://www.digikey.com/products/en/integrated-circuits-ics/... The SPC574S64E3CEFAR (https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/spc574s64e3.pdf) is 140MHz, has 1.5MB code + 64KB data flash and 96KB+32KB data RAM, and is available for $14.61 per 1ea. The SPC5744PFK1AMLQ9 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/MPC5744P.pdf) is $20.55@1, 200MHz, 2.5MB ECC flash, 384KB ECC RAM, and has two cores that support lockstep. The MPC5125YVN400 (https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/product-brief/MPC5125PB.pdf) is $29.72@1, 400MHz, supports DDR2@200MHz (only has 32KB onboard (S)RAM), and supports external flash. (I wonder if you could boot Linux on this thing?)
- na85 6y ago
  I miss DIP chips that would fit on breadboards. I don't have steady enough hands to solder QFP onto a PCB, and I'm too cheap to buy an oven :(
  - Ecco 6y ago
    You’re supposed to drag-solder those. Look it up on YouTube, it’s super easy. The hardest part is positioning the chip, but it’s actually easier than with an oven, because you can rework it if you only solder one or two pins :)
    - na85 6y ago
      Wow, just looked up a video and some guy did an 0.5mm pitch chip pretty darn quickly. Thank you!
      - Ecco 6y ago
        You’re welcome! Also, flux. Lots of it. Buy some good one, and use tons of it. Then clean the hell out of your PCB!
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      There's an even easier way than drag soldering - just solder it normally, without worrying about bridges. You can put tons of solder on it. The use some desoldering braid to soak up the excess solder. It will remove all the bridges and leave perfect joints.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pcb-for-48-qfn-or-48-tqfp/57383 https://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/smt-breakout-pc... can help. I have hand soldered STM32s to this adapter (use flux, a small tip)
  - foldr 6y ago
    A cheap toaster oven or hot air tool works fine for these. Or, as others have said, a regular soldering iron with lots of flux.
- awill 6y ago
  the war is over. Arm has won. That dominance will take a long time to fade. AWS and Apple's future is Arm.
darksaints 6y ago
OpenPOWER is pretty awesome but would be nowhere near as awesome as an OpenItanium. IMHO, Itanium was always mismarketed and misoptimized. It made a pretty good server processor, but not so good that enterprises were willing to migrate 40 year old software to run on it. In mobile form, it would have made a large leap in both performance and battery life. And it would have been a fairly easy market to break into: the average life of a mobile device is a few years, not a few decades. Recompilation and redistribution of software is the status quo.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  Itanuim deserved its fiery death and resurrection doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's a dead end architecture, and humanity gained (by freeing up valuable engineering power to other more useful endeavors) when it died.
  - darksaints 6y ago
    Itanium was an excellent idea that needed investment in compilers. Nobody wanted to make that investment because speculative execution got them 80% of the way there without the investment in compilers. But as it turns out, speculative execution was a phenomenally bad idea, and patching its security vulnerabilities has set back processor performance to the point where VLIW seems like a good idea again. We should have made those compiler improvements decades ago.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      NVidia Volta: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.06826.pdf Each machine instruction on NVidia Volta has the following information: * Reuse Flags * Wait Barrier Mask * Read/Write barrier index (6-bit bitmask) * Read Dependency barriers * Stall Cycles (4-bit) * Yield Flag (1-bit software hint: NVidia CU will select new warp, load-balancing the SMT resources of the compute unit) Itanium's idea of VLIW was commingled with other ideas; in particular, the idea of a compiler static-scheduler to minimize hardware work at runtime. To my eyes: the benefits of Itanium are implemented in NVidia's GPUs. The compiler for NVidia's compiler-scheduling flags has been made and is proven effective. Itanium itself: the crazy "bundling" of instructions and such, seems too complex. The explicit bitmasks / barriers of NVidia Volta seems more straightforward and clear in describing the dependency graph of code (and therefore: the potential parallelism). ---------- Clearly, static-compilers marking what is, and what isn't, parallelizable, is useful. NVidia Volta+ architectures have proven this. Furthermore, compilers that can emit such information already exist. I do await the day when other architectures wake up to this fact.

Koshkin 6y ago

The next Apple machine I am going to buy will be using RISC-V cores.

gumby 6y ago
Because of this transaction? I’m sure this deal will have absolutely no impact on apple’s deal with ARM. Apple could of course Afford to invest in RISC-V (and surely has played with it internally) but they have enough control of their future under the current arrangement that it will be a long long time before they feel any need to switch — 15 years at least.
- acomjean 6y ago
  Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards. This could change.
  - gumby 6y ago
    This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple’s POV) years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don’t know the internal details of course just the public ones so can’t say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the bridge while the problem was unfolding. Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I suspect the latter, as I’d imagine he’d be more dispassionate than Jobs. In any case I seriously doubt nvidia could, much less would benefit from cancelling Apple’s agreement.
    - TomVDB 6y ago
      > ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I've seen this argument made before. It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.

xigency 6y ago

> I never liked Softbank owning it, but hey someone has to. I understand what you're saying and this seems to be the prevailing pattern but I really don't understand it. ARM could easily be a standalone company. For some reason, mergers are in.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it's board of director's didn't (doesn't) know? In my experience companies merge when they are forced to, not because they want to. I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern. [1] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-reports-results-for-the-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2015 https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-re...
- xigency 6y ago
  I don't have any specific knowledge of the ARM sale but I've seen other mergers. Clearly, if a buyer is willing to pay a premium for shares, it's because they believe the company is worth that premium. If the shareholders were optimistic, they might consider that as a signal of the company's underlying value and choose not to sell. Sometimes activist shareholders will pressure a company to sell, like in the case of the Whole Foods sale to Amazon. Jana Partners owned ~8% and they motivated Whole Foods to look for buyers. They dumped their shares after the sale was announced and before it was executed. Whether that was the best for the other 92% of shareholders, the company's employees, and its customers is another question entirely. My question is really outside of that. There will always be banks, investors, and companies that are motivated to consolidate and integrate companies to be increasingly competitive to the point of being anti-competitive. What is the counter force that helps maintain moderately sized companies that are profitable on their own?