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Thats great news. I hope RISC-V catches on sooner rather than later because that would slow down ARM's dominance in the mobile space. Remember that ARM is propr

Thats great news. I hope RISC-V catches on sooner rather than later because that would slow down ARM's dominance in the mobile space. Remember that ARM is proprietary and is in the process of being bought by Nvidia, which has historically been hostile to open source drivers. And we'll have three competitors, x86_64/AMD64, ARM and RISC-V in the desktop/server space.

WJW 5y ago
Perhaps a dumb question, but is there good hope that it will catch on at all? From where I'm standing it looks like both x86_64 and ARM have so much more funding than RISC-V that it does not seem likely that RISC-V will ever catch up in capability to the bigger players.
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  On the other hand, nothing beats free. I am pretty sure every company that makes microcontrollers and embedded processors are at least evaluating RISC-V. I think NXP even announced they will make a chip. Check out this list of members of the RISC-V org: https://riscv.org/members/ https://riscv.org/members/
  - tcbawo 5y ago
    Doesn't free guarantee a lack of fat profit margin, unless you can add some sort of proprietary value on top of a reference design? It's hard to imagine who would make a big investment other than to undercut on price. You'd need a vertical technology stack or a captive audience.
    - makapuf 5y ago
      Being an ARM licensee has not been much of a differentiator either, when every other MCU manufacturer does cortex-m
    - thenewwazoo 5y ago
      Yes, but on the other hand, when the core is free, all your costs go into integration (which you’d have to do anyway) and those precise value-adds. That means you spend money on the differentiator alone.
      - avianes 5y ago
        RISC-V is not an open-source royalty-free Core design. It's an open-source royalty-free ISA. Using the RISC-V ISA is free, and that means being able to use all the tools developed for this ISA for free. It is still very attractive in terms of cost and competitiveness, but be careful not to confuse ISA and Core design
    - turbinerneiter 5y ago
      It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit. Even with Apple Silicon, where the CPU cores definitely look exciting, they spent a lot of time in the presentation on some obscure video codec cores - which enable the insane rendering performance. Microcontrollers are another example: you mostly don't buy them for their computational performance, but for their peripherals. Their USP are the right amount of the right interfaces that you happen to need, a crypto unit, the right number and quality of ADCs or DACs, and so on. I think RISC-V will lead to lots of new chips, with the same old boring CPU core, but exciting new co-cores for special use cases. At least that's what I'm pitching to my boss so he will let me start an evaluation project :)
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  If semiconductor technology reaches a point where it stops improving then maybe RISC-V will eventually get close enough where for at least some applications it's worth it if it's cheaper/easier to customize?

WJW 5y ago

Perhaps a dumb question, but is there good hope that it will catch on at all? From where I'm standing it looks like both x86_64 and ARM have so much more funding than RISC-V that it does not seem likely that RISC-V will ever catch up in capability to the bigger players.

turbinerneiter 5y ago
On the other hand, nothing beats free. I am pretty sure every company that makes microcontrollers and embedded processors are at least evaluating RISC-V. I think NXP even announced they will make a chip. Check out this list of members of the RISC-V org: https://riscv.org/members/ https://riscv.org/members/
- tcbawo 5y ago
  Doesn't free guarantee a lack of fat profit margin, unless you can add some sort of proprietary value on top of a reference design? It's hard to imagine who would make a big investment other than to undercut on price. You'd need a vertical technology stack or a captive audience.
  - makapuf 5y ago
    Being an ARM licensee has not been much of a differentiator either, when every other MCU manufacturer does cortex-m
  - thenewwazoo 5y ago
    Yes, but on the other hand, when the core is free, all your costs go into integration (which you’d have to do anyway) and those precise value-adds. That means you spend money on the differentiator alone.
    - avianes 5y ago
      RISC-V is not an open-source royalty-free Core design. It's an open-source royalty-free ISA. Using the RISC-V ISA is free, and that means being able to use all the tools developed for this ISA for free. It is still very attractive in terms of cost and competitiveness, but be careful not to confuse ISA and Core design
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit. Even with Apple Silicon, where the CPU cores definitely look exciting, they spent a lot of time in the presentation on some obscure video codec cores - which enable the insane rendering performance. Microcontrollers are another example: you mostly don't buy them for their computational performance, but for their peripherals. Their USP are the right amount of the right interfaces that you happen to need, a crypto unit, the right number and quality of ADCs or DACs, and so on. I think RISC-V will lead to lots of new chips, with the same old boring CPU core, but exciting new co-cores for special use cases. At least that's what I'm pitching to my boss so he will let me start an evaluation project :)
resoluteteeth 5y ago
If semiconductor technology reaches a point where it stops improving then maybe RISC-V will eventually get close enough where for at least some applications it's worth it if it's cheaper/easier to customize?