6 ms·

A CPU arm’s race is a great thing. Hopefully, RISC-V joins the race.

nwah1 6y ago
With all the efforts to isolate China, they are being forced to develop their own fabs and their own architectures. Their obvious choice is to use RISC-V as a base. With the world's largest economy behind it, RISC-V will probably become quite relevant soon.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  America is still the world's largest economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    I think that's missing the point of the parent comment. Being the largest doesn't really matter but if they were to put their money somewhere it wouldn't be x86.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Give it time. It's the momentum and room to grow that matters...
  - Zigurd 6y ago
    Nominal GDP is not the best measure for comparing industrial products, especially ones that go into products sold to and used by consumers. In PPP GDP terms, the Chinese economy is larger and PPP GDP is a better measure of how consumers and industrial customers will influence technology development.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      The question of nominal versus PPP GDP is a bit complicated, but a basic rule of thumb is that nominal GDP is better if you're measuring trade (since the nominal rate is the actual value you'll get during international exchange transactions), whereas PPP works better for individual cost-of-living or quality-of-life metrics. For measuring gross economy size, I would go with nominal GDP.
  - foepys 6y ago
    China will overtake the US within the next 10 years, possibly in or even before 2025, depending on how well the US handles the COVID-19 aftermath.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
    only for 7 more years: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/china-to-overtake-us-as-worlds-biggest-economy-by-2028-report-predicts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/china-to-overt...
  - africanboy 6y ago
    That's not really interesting per sé. Looking at the composition of the GDP China "accounted for 28 percent of global manufacturing output in 2018. That puts the country more than 10 percentage points ahead of the United States, which used to have the world's largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010." Which is a serious bind on future growth. There are also geopolitical issues that could radically change the equilibrium in the future. For example https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-for-tsmc/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-fo...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Which is a serious bind on future growth. I'm not sure those the US’S comparative advantage shifting to finance and IT over manufacturing is a “serious bind on future growth”. It a limitation of ability to avoid interdependence, but that's a different issue.
      - africanboy 6y ago
        Hon Hai is the largest manufacturer of components in the World and it's Chinese (they make, for example, Apple components with the name of Foxconn) TSMC is Chinese as well They are in what we call Taiwan, but the status of Taiwan it's unclear and it's not officially a sovereign state, what would happen if the two China reunite under the same government? China has also gained a big influence in Africa which is the fastest urbanizing region of the World and the second fastest region of the World for growth and it's on its way to become a 5 trillion economy “Right now you could say that any big project in African cities that is higher than three floors or roads that are longer than three kilometers are most likely being built and engineered by the Chinese. It is ubiquitous” (source: Forbes) They are playing the long game.
    - bwilli123 6y ago
      America will not recover until it re-introduces tariffs. This was the original mechanism by which America first industrialized (see Jeffersonianism) It would also benefit the Chinese people by forcing China to prioritize raising the welfare levels of their own consumers who are 2nd class citizens alongside manufacturer/exporters.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Why would they pick RISC-V. It is not as if China would let IP rights stop them from developing the CPU they think is best. Does RISC-V actually have an advantage other than the fact that is is open source? With the ton of existing software that is either x86 or ARM it would be easier from a backwards compatibility point of view to go with one of those. Would Europe or the US really get into an all out trade war with China over CPU instruction sets?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    They're going to want to be able to export it. Also, the primary advantage of x86 is that it runs all the legacy Windows software, but China wouldn't want to use something that the US controls the updates for, nor would they want to use something that isn't getting updates, nor would they want to maintain their own Windows fork. And if they're going to use Linux then the architecture doesn't really matter and they might as well use one that they can export if they feel like it.
neilalexander 6y ago
I’ve seen quite a few articles and people lamenting about how RISC-V is a badly designed ISA and requires a lot of instructions to do the same amount of work as other architectures. It would be interesting if someone knowledgeable on this could summarise whether that’s really a problem, or if there’s anything that would make RISC-V a strong or weak proposition?
- ranger207 6y ago
  >RISC-V... requires a lot of instructions to do the same amount of work as other architectures. So... they're complaining that it's RISC?
  - adrian_b 6y ago
    No they are complaining that it is too RISC compared to well designed RISC ISAs, e.g. ARM or POWER.
    - GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
      Do, please, look at The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas (book). There, ARM and x86 are directly compared with RISC-V. It would appear calling ARM 'well-designed' is an error. Calling it 'market success' is accurate. I've been on the RV bandwagon for five years now, and yet...as is usual in the corners of any non-trivial subsystem (arch; compiler; web environment; you name it), sticky unpleasant (even ugly) details emerge. For example, in RISC-V, the bits are 'jumbled up' when encoding constants; the argument is it, ultimately, makes the processing faster (due to the way sign-extension works). And, yes, this sort of detail is swept away into a debugger or other tools, so practically, no big deal. And yet... classic archs like pdp-11 don't have this problem. (it has other performance problems). And recently, RV supports big endian. Why? I don't know. What is happening is what happens when you get too many cooks: exploding complexity for minimal system gain. I'm afraid that RISC-V's time has come and gone. It is a 20th century instruction set attempting to serve us well into the 21st century. In my opinion, I think it's time for a do-over. RISC-VI anyone?

With all the efforts to isolate China, they are being forced to develop their own fabs and their own architectures. Their obvious choice is to use RISC-V as a base. With the world's largest economy behind it, RISC-V will probably become quite relevant soon.

da_big_ghey 6y ago
America is still the world's largest economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- kyriakos 6y ago
  I think that's missing the point of the parent comment. Being the largest doesn't really matter but if they were to put their money somewhere it wouldn't be x86.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Give it time. It's the momentum and room to grow that matters...
- Zigurd 6y ago
  Nominal GDP is not the best measure for comparing industrial products, especially ones that go into products sold to and used by consumers. In PPP GDP terms, the Chinese economy is larger and PPP GDP is a better measure of how consumers and industrial customers will influence technology development.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    The question of nominal versus PPP GDP is a bit complicated, but a basic rule of thumb is that nominal GDP is better if you're measuring trade (since the nominal rate is the actual value you'll get during international exchange transactions), whereas PPP works better for individual cost-of-living or quality-of-life metrics. For measuring gross economy size, I would go with nominal GDP.
- foepys 6y ago
  China will overtake the US within the next 10 years, possibly in or even before 2025, depending on how well the US handles the COVID-19 aftermath.
- GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
  only for 7 more years: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/china-to-overtake-us-as-worlds-biggest-economy-by-2028-report-predicts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/26/china-to-overt...
- africanboy 6y ago
  That's not really interesting per sé. Looking at the composition of the GDP China "accounted for 28 percent of global manufacturing output in 2018. That puts the country more than 10 percentage points ahead of the United States, which used to have the world's largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010." Which is a serious bind on future growth. There are also geopolitical issues that could radically change the equilibrium in the future. For example https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-for-tsmc/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/would-china-invade-taiwan-fo...
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Which is a serious bind on future growth. I'm not sure those the US’S comparative advantage shifting to finance and IT over manufacturing is a “serious bind on future growth”. It a limitation of ability to avoid interdependence, but that's a different issue.
    - africanboy 6y ago
      Hon Hai is the largest manufacturer of components in the World and it's Chinese (they make, for example, Apple components with the name of Foxconn) TSMC is Chinese as well They are in what we call Taiwan, but the status of Taiwan it's unclear and it's not officially a sovereign state, what would happen if the two China reunite under the same government? China has also gained a big influence in Africa which is the fastest urbanizing region of the World and the second fastest region of the World for growth and it's on its way to become a 5 trillion economy “Right now you could say that any big project in African cities that is higher than three floors or roads that are longer than three kilometers are most likely being built and engineered by the Chinese. It is ubiquitous” (source: Forbes) They are playing the long game.
  - bwilli123 6y ago
    America will not recover until it re-introduces tariffs. This was the original mechanism by which America first industrialized (see Jeffersonianism) It would also benefit the Chinese people by forcing China to prioritize raising the welfare levels of their own consumers who are 2nd class citizens alongside manufacturer/exporters.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
Why would they pick RISC-V. It is not as if China would let IP rights stop them from developing the CPU they think is best. Does RISC-V actually have an advantage other than the fact that is is open source? With the ton of existing software that is either x86 or ARM it would be easier from a backwards compatibility point of view to go with one of those. Would Europe or the US really get into an all out trade war with China over CPU instruction sets?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  They're going to want to be able to export it. Also, the primary advantage of x86 is that it runs all the legacy Windows software, but China wouldn't want to use something that the US controls the updates for, nor would they want to use something that isn't getting updates, nor would they want to maintain their own Windows fork. And if they're going to use Linux then the architecture doesn't really matter and they might as well use one that they can export if they feel like it.

neilalexander 6y ago

I’ve seen quite a few articles and people lamenting about how RISC-V is a badly designed ISA and requires a lot of instructions to do the same amount of work as other architectures. It would be interesting if someone knowledgeable on this could summarise whether that’s really a problem, or if there’s anything that would make RISC-V a strong or weak proposition?

ranger207 6y ago
>RISC-V... requires a lot of instructions to do the same amount of work as other architectures. So... they're complaining that it's RISC?
- adrian_b 6y ago
  No they are complaining that it is too RISC compared to well designed RISC ISAs, e.g. ARM or POWER.
  - GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
    Do, please, look at The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas (book). There, ARM and x86 are directly compared with RISC-V. It would appear calling ARM 'well-designed' is an error. Calling it 'market success' is accurate. I've been on the RV bandwagon for five years now, and yet...as is usual in the corners of any non-trivial subsystem (arch; compiler; web environment; you name it), sticky unpleasant (even ugly) details emerge. For example, in RISC-V, the bits are 'jumbled up' when encoding constants; the argument is it, ultimately, makes the processing faster (due to the way sign-extension works). And, yes, this sort of detail is swept away into a debugger or other tools, so practically, no big deal. And yet... classic archs like pdp-11 don't have this problem. (it has other performance problems). And recently, RV supports big endian. Why? I don't know. What is happening is what happens when you get too many cooks: exploding complexity for minimal system gain. I'm afraid that RISC-V's time has come and gone. It is a 20th century instruction set attempting to serve us well into the 21st century. In my opinion, I think it's time for a do-over. RISC-VI anyone?