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I don't know anything about the design flaws, so I can't comment on that, but as for the rest, the strategy of RISC-V worked out pretty well for everyone with t

I don't know anything about the design flaws, so I can't comment on that, but as for the rest, the strategy of RISC-V worked out pretty well for everyone with the advent of the PC[1]. I'm not sure why it wouldn't work again. What would be so different between how things were done then with the PC and this now? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_architecture

spijdar 6y ago
Well, it's not all peaches and roses. See, the confusing miasma surrounding USB and its various overloaded capabilities. Or PCIe -- if you want to use ROCm on AMD GPUs, your PCIe complex needs to support "PCIe atomics", which, uh, none of my computers do. AMD's boards do, though! That's nitpicking though. I don't think PC's open architecture is really comparable, the truly open bits like PCI are much less "open to interpretation" as RISC-V, while bits like the CPU socket, chipsets, and even the keyboard port were either proprietary or clones of proprietary tech.
- floatboth 6y ago
  > if you want to use ROCm on AMD GPUs, your PCIe complex needs to support "PCIe atomics" Not anymore, at least for Vega cards: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/800#issuecomment-525925928 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/800#issueco... > AMD's boards do, though! No board support is required, this is on the SoC ("CPU") side, unless you're trying to connect the GPU via a chipset-side low-bandwidth slot. Intel supports it since Haswell on desktop (and earlier in Xeons apparently), Marvell ThunderX2 and Mellanox BlueField support it, I'm pretty sure Ampere does too.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Yeah, it's the only reason I've thought about upgrading my polaris card up newer. In my case, I tried connecting both via thunderbolt on some skylake/coffeelake laptops and on power9. Neither Intel's TB3 controller nor power9 support the necessary extension. Not really a big deal, but a nitpicky example of how "fragmentation" sometimes hurts.
kiwidrew 6y ago
RISC-V is just an instruction set specification. It says absolutely nothing about the peripherals that need to be attached to a RISC-V core to produce a usable system. Whereas the IBM PC was delivered as a complete system (including all the peripherals and glue logic) and to achieve 100% compatibility the clones were exactly that: they copied absolutely everything about the PC, down to level of the individual logic gates in the "glue" that interfaced the CPU and memory and peripheral controllers.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That's not the point. The point is the open architectures of any sort are probably beneficial for everyone.

spijdar 6y ago

Well, it's not all peaches and roses. See, the confusing miasma surrounding USB and its various overloaded capabilities. Or PCIe -- if you want to use ROCm on AMD GPUs, your PCIe complex needs to support "PCIe atomics", which, uh, none of my computers do. AMD's boards do, though! That's nitpicking though. I don't think PC's open architecture is really comparable, the truly open bits like PCI are much less "open to interpretation" as RISC-V, while bits like the CPU socket, chipsets, and even the keyboard port were either proprietary or clones of proprietary tech.

floatboth 6y ago
> if you want to use ROCm on AMD GPUs, your PCIe complex needs to support "PCIe atomics" Not anymore, at least for Vega cards: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/800#issuecomment-525925928 https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/800#issueco... > AMD's boards do, though! No board support is required, this is on the SoC ("CPU") side, unless you're trying to connect the GPU via a chipset-side low-bandwidth slot. Intel supports it since Haswell on desktop (and earlier in Xeons apparently), Marvell ThunderX2 and Mellanox BlueField support it, I'm pretty sure Ampere does too.
- spijdar 6y ago
  Yeah, it's the only reason I've thought about upgrading my polaris card up newer. In my case, I tried connecting both via thunderbolt on some skylake/coffeelake laptops and on power9. Neither Intel's TB3 controller nor power9 support the necessary extension. Not really a big deal, but a nitpicky example of how "fragmentation" sometimes hurts.

kiwidrew 6y ago

RISC-V is just an instruction set specification. It says absolutely nothing about the peripherals that need to be attached to a RISC-V core to produce a usable system. Whereas the IBM PC was delivered as a complete system (including all the peripherals and glue logic) and to achieve 100% compatibility the clones were exactly that: they copied absolutely everything about the PC, down to level of the individual logic gates in the "glue" that interfaced the CPU and memory and peripheral controllers.

guerrilla 6y ago
That's not the point. The point is the open architectures of any sort are probably beneficial for everyone.