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"Overall, RISC-V will lead in a revolution for nationalist vanity CPUs (think Loongson; no one will run them but for show and perhaps a niche of radical ideolog
by throwaway4good 6y ago
"Overall, RISC-V will lead in a revolution for nationalist vanity CPUs (think Loongson; no one will run them but for show and perhaps a niche of radical ideologues)."
With the US-China tech war that has obviously changed.
The US has demonstrated an ability and a willingness to prevent China from using highend fab and ARM thus forcing China to invest massively in chip production.
That is why RISC-V with its free ISA has its moment now.
Not because it is novel from a technical perspective.
- tyingq 6y agoThe use cases like what Western Digital is doing seems like a reasonable driver as well. If they demonstrate some notable cost savings versus ARM, that should drive other companies that direction.
- rwmj 6y agoAllWinner are another one. They are currently doing 5 million RISC-V chips at TSMC, because that'll save them a few pennies per finished phone/tablet.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> Not because it is novel from a technical perspective. If I understand correctly, it wasn't really trying to be technically novel. RISC-V wasn't mean to be a research ISA experimenting with interesting new ideas, it was meant to be a decent Free and Open ISA using modern but established design principles.
- quelsolaar 6y agoIt was originally designed as an educational project to teach students simple CPU design.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI don't think that's right, or if it is, Wikipedia [0] is giving a misleading account: > The plan was to help both academic and industrial users. Practicality seems to have been a goal from the start, unlike DLX/MIX/MMIX which were primarily intended for teaching. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#History
- hajile 6y agoMost people learn MIPS in college, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t battle tested or usable for commercial chips.
- brucehoult 6y agoThe problems with MIPS are not technical or ecosystem or being battle-tested or not. The problem is it is proprietary and since sometime between when SGI spun it out (and the expected rise of Itanium) and the purchase by Imagination Technologies it has been run by a series of incompetent and/or people who just want to extract as much money as possible and then get out. They've had some great technical people throughout who have revamped an modernized it, but in the end it's the proprietary nature and mismanagement that has been more important.
- er4hn 6y agoI'm going to take a contrarian point - what is so bad about vanity projects? I'm not going to touch on the connection between nationalism and these vanity projects, but the fact that teams can be sponsored to work on their own OSs or their own CPUs is valuable in itself. Having more people be able to learn about complex systems that would otherwise require working at one of the specialized places for those - the Linux Kernel Team, Microsoft, AMD, Intel, etc, seems like a good thing. It is a way for a new set of people to get practical experience without the constraints of being inside an existing organization.