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Scaling RISC-V will be orders of magnitude easier than anything of the X86 lineage. It’s a new clean modern design with so much less complexity and legacy bagga
by api 5y ago
Scaling RISC-V will be orders of magnitude easier than anything of the X86 lineage. It’s a new clean modern design with so much less complexity and legacy baggage. Intel could build crazy fast RISC-V designs within a few years at most if they want to.
A very interesting path back to relevance for Intel would be to design proprietary absolutely crazy fast RISC-V cores and market them in the data center and HPC markets first. The tooling on Linux is about there. Eventually they could get an initially small but very loyal developer laptop market going too. A good RISC-V design could easily compete with the Apple M1.
Get enough momentum and a Windows port could happen. Then you could reboot the PC market.
The automotive and drone niches would be interesting too. There is a market there for low power high performance chips for things like driving assist and autonomy. A new instruction set wouldn’t matter much since the whole software stack is more or less custom anyway.
At the very least it would be a way to hedge in case X86 really does start to enter a death spiral.
- postalrat 5y agoIf it's so easy to create fast risc-v cores then why hasn't it been done?
- api 5y agoNobody’s done it yet, probably due to lack of perceived demand. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not so easy that a few college kids could just whip one out. A company like Intel or AMD could definitely do it.
- brucehoult 5y agoIt's not exactly easy -- more of "we know how to do it, given funding". Designing any fast modern chip -- such as the Apple M1 -- probably still costs around a billion dollars. In the RISC-V world the company with the most funding so far is SiFive and they've had $190 million. Intel getting involved could change that very quickly.