4 ms·

That is spooky! I mean there was clearly a lot of analysis put into aarch64 - which probably involved Apple etc - but I've seen comments previously saying they

That is spooky! I mean there was clearly a lot of analysis put into aarch64 - which probably involved Apple etc - but I've seen comments previously saying they obviously got it wrong because [insert some headline design decision]. They might have got it wrong but they're definitely not amateurs at this and you can't prove anything with a one line comment.

ignoramous 5y ago
I guess the point is, given the eye balls RISC-V is going to attract, you'd have your Tencents and Apples of the world pouring resources into it, just like they did with AARCH64. And when that happens, where does ARM, as a company, go? They did to Intel what RISC-V is poised to do to them, may be in a decade or two. I feel ARM could go the Docker way, who faced a similar foe in the stakeholders seeking to commoditize their core business... ruthlessly stomped on them, creating k8s, runc, registries, microvms, serverless, and what-not. Despite Docker having stellar engs working for them (and in some cases, better tech: Swarm, for instance), there's nothing they could do.
- klelatti 5y ago
  Why would Apple pour resources into it? To save a few cents licensing costs on a $1,000 smartphone and give up a decade of hardware and software investment. Sorry, not buying it.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Apple already have a "We can do whatever the fuck we want" licence on aarch64 anyway, notice how they've been adding their own instructions?
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > you'd have your Tencents and Apples of the world pouring resources into it The Tencent and Apple of the world are...Tencent and Apple. If Amazon say decided to throw billions at developing a Graviton 4 using RISC-V...they really couldn't leverage much of their previous Graviton development work. They also wouldn't have a deep bench of low level RISC-V wunderkind to bring on board to leverage the new platform. It's a chicken and egg problem. Why would Amazon then want to pay to bootstrap a whole RISC-V market? That's a lot of CapEx without a clear potential for returns. You'll note they did develop Graviton using the ARM ISA so they didn't have to create from whole cloth a "Graviton" market. Amazon made the same decision as PC makers in the 80s. They consolidated around the IBM clone architecture to take advantage of the rest of the market, especially Microsoft and IBM, supporting the IBM clone market. Commodore, Atari, and Apple all had to fight uphill against IBM clone market. I haven't seen any technical advantage of RISC-V over ARM that would suggest it's worth pouring billions of development dollars into. It might make sense for Western Digital for drive controllers but not phone, tablet, PC, or server makers.
  - humanwhosits 5y ago
    > I haven't seen any technical advantage RISC-V has geopolitical advantage however in that it's not controlled by US/UK. I can see why Amazon wouldn't pay to bootstrap that, but I can see why Tencent/Huawai/Alibaba would try to.
  - jabl 5y ago
    AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc. and creating a SoC, which is manufactured by someone else. Even this is no walk in the park, I'm sure Amazon has hundreds(?) of engineers working on Graviton. Now, if someone would create a RISC-V core competitive with the Arm server cores, and an ecosystem of RISC-V compatible peripherals (well, not compatible in the sense that some random peripheral would need to care about the ISA, but that Arm might not want to licenses their peripherals to a RISC-V based project?) shows up, I'm sure Amazon could do roughly the same with a hypothetical RISC-V Graviton. But if you're talking about designing a RISC-V core from scratch, that's a whole different ballgame.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      > AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc. This is my point. Amazon using ARM lets them tap into the huge ARM ecosystem with minimal investment on their part. The cores they're using have known qualities and meet whatever performance targets they want. At this point RISC-V doesn't have that same ecosystem. It doesn't even have extant high performance cores someone can just order. Building momentum is expensive. If selling that ecosystem isn't your main business it's probably not worth investing millions or billions to develop it.

ignoramous 5y ago

I guess the point is, given the eye balls RISC-V is going to attract, you'd have your Tencents and Apples of the world pouring resources into it, just like they did with AARCH64. And when that happens, where does ARM, as a company, go? They did to Intel what RISC-V is poised to do to them, may be in a decade or two. I feel ARM could go the Docker way, who faced a similar foe in the stakeholders seeking to commoditize their core business... ruthlessly stomped on them, creating k8s, runc, registries, microvms, serverless, and what-not. Despite Docker having stellar engs working for them (and in some cases, better tech: Swarm, for instance), there's nothing they could do.

klelatti 5y ago
Why would Apple pour resources into it? To save a few cents licensing costs on a $1,000 smartphone and give up a decade of hardware and software investment. Sorry, not buying it.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Apple already have a "We can do whatever the fuck we want" licence on aarch64 anyway, notice how they've been adding their own instructions?
giantrobot 5y ago
> you'd have your Tencents and Apples of the world pouring resources into it The Tencent and Apple of the world are...Tencent and Apple. If Amazon say decided to throw billions at developing a Graviton 4 using RISC-V...they really couldn't leverage much of their previous Graviton development work. They also wouldn't have a deep bench of low level RISC-V wunderkind to bring on board to leverage the new platform. It's a chicken and egg problem. Why would Amazon then want to pay to bootstrap a whole RISC-V market? That's a lot of CapEx without a clear potential for returns. You'll note they did develop Graviton using the ARM ISA so they didn't have to create from whole cloth a "Graviton" market. Amazon made the same decision as PC makers in the 80s. They consolidated around the IBM clone architecture to take advantage of the rest of the market, especially Microsoft and IBM, supporting the IBM clone market. Commodore, Atari, and Apple all had to fight uphill against IBM clone market. I haven't seen any technical advantage of RISC-V over ARM that would suggest it's worth pouring billions of development dollars into. It might make sense for Western Digital for drive controllers but not phone, tablet, PC, or server makers.
- humanwhosits 5y ago
  > I haven't seen any technical advantage RISC-V has geopolitical advantage however in that it's not controlled by US/UK. I can see why Amazon wouldn't pay to bootstrap that, but I can see why Tencent/Huawai/Alibaba would try to.
- jabl 5y ago
  AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc. and creating a SoC, which is manufactured by someone else. Even this is no walk in the park, I'm sure Amazon has hundreds(?) of engineers working on Graviton. Now, if someone would create a RISC-V core competitive with the Arm server cores, and an ecosystem of RISC-V compatible peripherals (well, not compatible in the sense that some random peripheral would need to care about the ISA, but that Arm might not want to licenses their peripherals to a RISC-V based project?) shows up, I'm sure Amazon could do roughly the same with a hypothetical RISC-V Graviton. But if you're talking about designing a RISC-V core from scratch, that's a whole different ballgame.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc. This is my point. Amazon using ARM lets them tap into the huge ARM ecosystem with minimal investment on their part. The cores they're using have known qualities and meet whatever performance targets they want. At this point RISC-V doesn't have that same ecosystem. It doesn't even have extant high performance cores someone can just order. Building momentum is expensive. If selling that ecosystem isn't your main business it's probably not worth investing millions or billions to develop it.