4 ms·

Can you expand on Taleb's message, and what you mean when you say "can't fail"? Free stuff does fail for all kinds of reasons.

cushychicken 5y ago
Companies fail. Information doesn't. By virtue of being open source, RISC-V won't vanish, no matter how many companies choose to adopt it as their ISA and fail. Seems like, given enough time, one of those companies will just not die, and end up getting big.
- pm90 5y ago
  There's a lot of open source projects, most of them fail. I don't think the availability of an OSS ISA is good enough to overcome the friction of adopting a brand new technology, unless it enables something that competitors don't. And it doesn't seem to do that w.r.t ARM (so far).
- chmod600 5y ago
  If I write a free operating system, nobody will use it except me. When I lose interest literally zero people will care that it exists. Hard for me to see how that would be a success no matter how many copies of the useless bits reside around the world.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    You absolutely will (almost certainly). But if you take the set of people who have written free operating systems, there's at least one big winner.
blippage 5y ago
I can't remember the exact criteria that Taleb mentioned that led me to believe that great things might come of RISC-V. So I'll fall back on the "optionality" argument. Vendors, particularly small vendors, can experiment with RISC-V either free, or very cheaply more so than they can with ARM. Right there, RISC-V opens up a segment that didn't exist before. They'll be more experimentation. When your downsides are limited, but your upside is potentially huge, that's what I mean by "optionality". This is a powerful driver of success. Naturally, any individual endeavour can fail, but collectively, there's going to be some huge winners. My prediction is that RISC-V will open up some new category of computing. I can't tell you what it is, who will do it, or when they'll do it, because I don't know. My point is not so much that I can predict what it will be, but merely that there are forces in favour of RISC-V. I am not, however, predicting the imminent demise of ARM. I think also that a lot of commentators are viewing things through the lens of what we understand and the received wisdom today. Even - or maybe especially - experts tend to be hemmed in by what is "obvious". RISC-V is like a genie that's been let out of the bottle. You can't put it back in.
- tyingq 5y ago
  The "minion cores"[1] idea from lowrisc.org might be a good early example. You can find something similar for one ARM chip I know of (TI Sitara with PRUs), but only one that I know of...perhaps because it's expensive to experiment like that, as you mention. [1] https://lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ https://lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-min...
- josemanuel 5y ago
  Vendors can experiment with Arm for free with “Arm Flexible Access”!

cushychicken 5y ago

Companies fail. Information doesn't. By virtue of being open source, RISC-V won't vanish, no matter how many companies choose to adopt it as their ISA and fail. Seems like, given enough time, one of those companies will just not die, and end up getting big.

pm90 5y ago
There's a lot of open source projects, most of them fail. I don't think the availability of an OSS ISA is good enough to overcome the friction of adopting a brand new technology, unless it enables something that competitors don't. And it doesn't seem to do that w.r.t ARM (so far).
chmod600 5y ago
If I write a free operating system, nobody will use it except me. When I lose interest literally zero people will care that it exists. Hard for me to see how that would be a success no matter how many copies of the useless bits reside around the world.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  You absolutely will (almost certainly). But if you take the set of people who have written free operating systems, there's at least one big winner.

blippage 5y ago

I can't remember the exact criteria that Taleb mentioned that led me to believe that great things might come of RISC-V. So I'll fall back on the "optionality" argument. Vendors, particularly small vendors, can experiment with RISC-V either free, or very cheaply more so than they can with ARM. Right there, RISC-V opens up a segment that didn't exist before. They'll be more experimentation. When your downsides are limited, but your upside is potentially huge, that's what I mean by "optionality". This is a powerful driver of success. Naturally, any individual endeavour can fail, but collectively, there's going to be some huge winners. My prediction is that RISC-V will open up some new category of computing. I can't tell you what it is, who will do it, or when they'll do it, because I don't know. My point is not so much that I can predict what it will be, but merely that there are forces in favour of RISC-V. I am not, however, predicting the imminent demise of ARM. I think also that a lot of commentators are viewing things through the lens of what we understand and the received wisdom today. Even - or maybe especially - experts tend to be hemmed in by what is "obvious". RISC-V is like a genie that's been let out of the bottle. You can't put it back in.

tyingq 5y ago
The "minion cores"[1] idea from lowrisc.org might be a good early example. You can find something similar for one ARM chip I know of (TI Sitara with PRUs), but only one that I know of...perhaps because it's expensive to experiment like that, as you mention. [1] https://lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-minion-cores/ https://lowrisc.org/docs/memo-2014-001-tagged-memory-and-min...
josemanuel 5y ago
Vendors can experiment with Arm for free with “Arm Flexible Access”!