2 ms·

What is RISC-V? It's an ISA not a microarchitecture. If you can make x86 fast you can make RISC-V fast

• toast0 5y ago
  Sure, you can make anything fast, but the question is will it take 40 years of a lot of work, and if so, where will x86 and ARM be when you get there? I'd suspect an ISA designed in the last few years with performance in mind (even if not a priority), wouldn't take as long to get to where the industry is now, but it's still a lot of years of focused effort required, and we'll see. I don't have a horse in the race, except that I do like my experience to not evaporate; and I sincerly hope real mode segmented address edge cases aren't something I'd need to relearn on another ISA even though they're still (barely) relevant on x86 in early boot.
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    The point is that you can make it fast more easily. Decoding x86 instructions in parallel efficiently is taxing, whereas with ARM and RISC-V it's much more tractable for example. Saying X86 is 40 years work is also kind of stupid, as a huge amount of the ISA dead weight, and high performance implementations have their roots much earlier than that (e.g. Intel have tried to move on at least once and ended up coming back to the OOO superscalar paradigm).
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      As stupid as it may be, it is 40 years of tooling, libraries and languages.
      • snvzz 5y ago
        What's still in use tends to fall into two categories: 1. Already ported. 2. Not dependent on modern performance, and thus well served by emulation.