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I'm really hoping one of the other chipmakers jumps on the RISC-V bandwagon. There's substantial potential to do to ARM what ARM did to x86 here. If Intel/AMD
by edrxty 6y ago
I'm really hoping one of the other chipmakers jumps on the RISC-V bandwagon. There's substantial potential to do to ARM what ARM did to x86 here. If Intel/AMD/Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever started talking about a significant RISC-V offering I'd be buying as much of their stock as I could.
- acegopher 6y agoRISC-V doesn't offer the same advantage over ARM that ARM has over x86, so that's unlikely to happen.
- edrxty 6y agoI work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoThat sounds really interesting — what makes RISC-V better than ARM for this?
- edrxty 6y agoPartly the design of the core, partly the open source nature. Speaking from experience, it's really hard to push the envelope with ARM chips as they refuse to license them for FPGA deployments so there's not a lot of work being done there.
- varispeed 6y agoWhat stops anyone from implementing ARM ISA on FPGA? If you think of an ISA like an API - that's something that is not copyrightable, so in theory anyone could do ARM on FPGA. So I am guessing that nobody wants to bear the cost of such development and also risking potential lawsuit?
- edrxty 6y agoYeah, that's pretty much it. There's no real upside and you risk a lawsuit. There are plenty of other ISAs that will work and are licensable for FPGA development
- floatboth 6y agoAt the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired. RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.
- edrxty 6y agoThis is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is rarely the goal for small-to-medium projects. Example: https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/ https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/
- saagarjha 6y agoI don’t think the claim was that tooling could not handle these custom instructions; I think the claim was that nobody wants custom instructions in cross-platform software.
- foobiekr 6y agoARM didn’t do anything to x86. One specific team at one company did something. Maybe two if you’re super generous and include graviton.
- edrxty 6y agoARM is destroying x86 across the board, not just at Apple. They've long won the mobile space and are now making significant inroads into the server market, long thought to be the last bastion of Intel/x86.
- foobiekr 6y agoWhat's the revenue of ARM server CPUs?
- breakfastduck 6y agoIt doesn't matter. The revenue for x86 server CPUs goes down every time Amazon install a CPU they made themselves instead of buying an intel chip.
- edrxty 6y agoGood luck getting that info from Amazon, though at least a third of their offered instance types are ARM based.