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It is a question of relative advantage. RISC-V has in relative terms much stronger benefit used in co-processors than ARM. That will drive RISC-V adoption in th
by socialdemocrat 6y ago
It is a question of relative advantage. RISC-V has in relative terms much stronger benefit used in co-processors than ARM. That will drive RISC-V adoption in this area.
However for general CPUs the RISC-V is not as obvious, although we have seen some early claims of some really efficient RISC-V implementation with much higher clock frequency than ARM at lower watt usage. So sure, when we no more, it may turn out that RISC-V is also the superior choice for main CPU. But at the moment, that is more of an unknown.
If we for the moment only assume a slight advantage to RISC-V over ARM, then ARM will stay ahead of the game, because it is already entrenched. People have lots of tooling and software for ARM. You don't switch to a whole new CPU architecture without clear benefit.
But there is an interesting argument/speculation to be made about what happens in the wider PC industry in response to M1. By the time PC makers start getting serious to meet the challenge from M1, it may have become apparent that higher performance RISC-V are possible. Thus it could possibly encourage Apple competitors to attempt to leapfrog Apple by going towards RISC-V instead as main CPU.
But nothing happens without Microsoft, so who knows. A lot of coordination needs to happen.
- snvzz 6y ago>If we for the moment only assume a slight advantage to RISC-V over ARM, then ARM will stay ahead of the game, because it is already entrenched. Licensing costs and NVIDIA's ARM purchase --hostile company with plenty of lawsuits with current ARM licensees-- will offset the (non-existant beyond Apple and a few Windows netbook experiments) entrenchment ARM has on the desktop. >People have lots of tooling and software for ARM. You don't switch to a whole new CPU architecture without clear benefit. There's been a lot of effort put into tooling for RISC-V over the last few years, with more ongoing. The RISC-V foundation member list is not to be ignored. There's strong corporate and government backing behind RISC-V. The existing licenses won't disappear, but whether new cores and/or new ISA revisions from ARM will get licensees post-NVIDIA purchase is anybody's guess. Mid/Long term, I just don't see ARM stand a chance against RISC-V.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoIt will be interesting to see, but both macOS and Windows already run on ARM and it is a widely known instruction-set. For companies to suddenly switch to RISC-V instead I think there needs to be some very clear advantages. I am starting to see hints that RISC-V designs may be able to outperform ARM by a good margin. But thus far I don't think that is a firmly established truth.
- snvzz 6y agoThe main blockers are B and V extensions not being ratified yet. They're close to ready and some chips are being released that support the drafts, but as these extensions are required for high performance implementations and as incompatible changes might still happen, these chips aren't going anywhere but embedded, where there's control over the whole stack. And SBC devboards, where people will grab them with full awareness of this situation. Besides SiFive, there's the PicoRio, some new SBC SoC from Allwinner, and a successor for the kendryte k210. All meant to be purchasable in early 2021. Some of them with these draft extensions. Meantime, I am playing with FPGAs (iCE40 and ECP5).
- brucehoult 6y agoAll of that will of course be resolved in the next 12 or 24 months. Too late for Apple, at least in this iteration. Once they have completed the AS switch they could contemplate another one in maybe five years, if there's some advantage. Even in two years, before developers build too many arm64 assumptions into their freshly-ported from x86 code.