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> while noting that Arm faces stiff competition from emerging RISC-V competitors Is the competition from RISC-V really that stiff?

by thayne 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago
Not now, but the ISA is so superficial for a modern superscaler out-of-order design I don't see why existing designs couldn't easily be "reskinned", say if Nvidia-ARM jacked up fees. I think most of the effort is getting GCC, LLVM, Linux, etc. support, and some working design to put RISC-V on top of. In other words, the difficult is in the number of cats to be herded. In a way, I hope the deal does go through just to accelerate the transition away from ARM.
- marmarama 5y ago
  All of the RISC-V software ecosystem exists, and you can buy high performance out-of-order RISC-V implementations now from SiFive, as well as low power implementations that are very competitive with low power ARM. The only problem right now is that high performance in the RISC-V world is about 4-5 generations behind ARM, so the fastest SoCs you can buy have cores that are roughly equivalent to a Cortex A73. SiFive is catching up a little each generation but they are a way off yet.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yeah I think that "4-5 generations" is not about RISC-V intrinsically needing to catch up, but about the current RISC-V manufacturers needing to catch up. I see 0 reason an apple silicon or amazon graviton couldn't be reskinned in a few months time, loosing no speed.
justincormack 5y ago
In some areas, mainly microcontrollers especially with additional custom features. But not really in the high end at this point.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Yes, if it eats them from the low end up, it can potentially do what Intel did to minicomputers and what ARM is trying to do to Intel. There is a low barrier to hardware design for microcontrollers, and there is almost no innovation in the ISA these days it is all in the digital logic and software around it, so charging for that is approaching rent-seeking. Not saying the ARM64 ISA is not nice and clean, but it's a warmed over RISC. There's nothing revolutionary about it and no new ideas. It just shouldn't be something that locks you in to a vendor, or requires you to pay a tax on every device. It's an "API", it should be open.

> while noting that Arm faces stiff competition from emerging RISC-V competitors Is the competition from RISC-V really that stiff?

by thayne 5y ago

> while noting that Arm faces stiff competition from emerging RISC-V competitors Is the competition from RISC-V really that stiff?

Ericson2314 5y ago

Not now, but the ISA is so superficial for a modern superscaler out-of-order design I don't see why existing designs couldn't easily be "reskinned", say if Nvidia-ARM jacked up fees. I think most of the effort is getting GCC, LLVM, Linux, etc. support, and some working design to put RISC-V on top of. In other words, the difficult is in the number of cats to be herded. In a way, I hope the deal does go through just to accelerate the transition away from ARM.

marmarama 5y ago
All of the RISC-V software ecosystem exists, and you can buy high performance out-of-order RISC-V implementations now from SiFive, as well as low power implementations that are very competitive with low power ARM. The only problem right now is that high performance in the RISC-V world is about 4-5 generations behind ARM, so the fastest SoCs you can buy have cores that are roughly equivalent to a Cortex A73. SiFive is catching up a little each generation but they are a way off yet.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Yeah I think that "4-5 generations" is not about RISC-V intrinsically needing to catch up, but about the current RISC-V manufacturers needing to catch up. I see 0 reason an apple silicon or amazon graviton couldn't be reskinned in a few months time, loosing no speed.

justincormack 5y ago

In some areas, mainly microcontrollers especially with additional custom features. But not really in the high end at this point.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

Yes, if it eats them from the low end up, it can potentially do what Intel did to minicomputers and what ARM is trying to do to Intel. There is a low barrier to hardware design for microcontrollers, and there is almost no innovation in the ISA these days it is all in the digital logic and software around it, so charging for that is approaching rent-seeking. Not saying the ARM64 ISA is not nice and clean, but it's a warmed over RISC. There's nothing revolutionary about it and no new ideas. It just shouldn't be something that locks you in to a vendor, or requires you to pay a tax on every device. It's an "API", it should be open.