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not necessarily a dumb question. as I see it, it's an open cpu, and does not require licensing fees. a huge amount of devices ship with arm cortex devices, ea

not necessarily a dumb question. as I see it, it's an open cpu, and does not require licensing fees. a huge amount of devices ship with arm cortex devices, each one low power and with money going back to arm for the licenses. risc-v provides for an open system that is performant and free of license fees.

spijdar 6y ago
It provides for a open/royalty free system that is potentially performant. RISC-V alone provides little in terms of helping create better CPU implementations. An ARM core could probably be reworked into a RISC-V core and vice-versa -- it's ultimately "just" an instruction set. It benefits the CPU manufacturer, as they don't have to pay licensing fees and can therefore earn a buck more in profit. RISC-V isn't really intrinsically more open (from an end user perspective) than many of its competitors -- it does, however, have a lot of hype and social intertia behind it, which may be enough to propel it to greatness. One benefit of RISC-V is it offers a modular instruction set, where a "RISC-V" CPU can implement a subset of functionality and add new instructions in a well defined way. One downside to this is the possibility for the ISA to be splintered in practice if the major vendors end up not supporting a uniform feature set.
- nickik 6y ago
  A RISC-V CPU is inherently more open even from an end user perspective. That is not practically relevant for end-users if you consider somebody using for example a USB stick an enduser. However you could take the code on your device and run it on a alternatives providers implementation or on an open implementation. But just like end users of software don't really get practical benefits from open source, its the same for hardware. The advantage is for the industry and developers.
mhh__ 6y ago
> it's an open cpu, Not true. ISA != RTL

spijdar 6y ago

It provides for a open/royalty free system that is potentially performant. RISC-V alone provides little in terms of helping create better CPU implementations. An ARM core could probably be reworked into a RISC-V core and vice-versa -- it's ultimately "just" an instruction set. It benefits the CPU manufacturer, as they don't have to pay licensing fees and can therefore earn a buck more in profit. RISC-V isn't really intrinsically more open (from an end user perspective) than many of its competitors -- it does, however, have a lot of hype and social intertia behind it, which may be enough to propel it to greatness. One benefit of RISC-V is it offers a modular instruction set, where a "RISC-V" CPU can implement a subset of functionality and add new instructions in a well defined way. One downside to this is the possibility for the ISA to be splintered in practice if the major vendors end up not supporting a uniform feature set.

nickik 6y ago
A RISC-V CPU is inherently more open even from an end user perspective. That is not practically relevant for end-users if you consider somebody using for example a USB stick an enduser. However you could take the code on your device and run it on a alternatives providers implementation or on an open implementation. But just like end users of software don't really get practical benefits from open source, its the same for hardware. The advantage is for the industry and developers.

mhh__ 6y ago

> it's an open cpu, Not true. ISA != RTL