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take my comment with a bag full of sand, i am no expert, still when you talk about ARM, you have to license designs from the ARM, inc. Apple with its apple sil
by 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
take my comment with a bag full of sand, i am no expert, still
when you talk about ARM, you have to license designs from the ARM, inc. Apple with its apple silicon is licensing from ARM the designs and IP from them.
with RISC-v, there is no company to hold you hostage for designs and all. its all open source so you can build your own chip, own design, own tech, everything.
this also means i assume that in the long run, if RISC-v and ARM are on equal footing, RISC-v would be more freer, cheaper because there is no licensing and other corporate stuff to go through like with ARM, inc
- goodpoint 5y ago> with RISC-v, there is no company to hold you hostage for designs and all No no no. The RISC-V ISA is open. The implementation of RISC-V CPUs is often proprietary.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoOK. So can't there be multiple competing implementations? Proprietary but some like those university projects, Foss ?
- monocasa 5y agoYeah, the spec is free with a permissive license, and individual implementations are expanding to fill the full gamut of free to proprietary.
- goodpoint 5y agoThere are open and closed implementations. Unfortunately the license on the ISA does not require implementations to be open.
- LeFantome 5y ago
- WanderPanda 5y agoHow to prevent e.g. Alibaba from embrace-extend-extinguishing RISC-V? It seems so obvies that this will happen in one way or another
- snvzz 5y agoUpstream toolchains won't readily accept extensions that aren't part of the standard, and maintaining forks is costly. There is no incentive not to get extensions standardized. In the first place, what's even missing in RISC-V? As of December's 15 extensions, it is pretty much there already, in terms of functionality.
- brucehoult 5y agoExactly. Extend it with what? Intel and AMD each have instructions in their x86 chips that the other doesn't have. No one cares, pretty much. If you're building your own performance-critical software to run on a specific chip then you might enable some of them (or just do "gcc -march=native") but software distributed in binary form generally gets on fine without them.
- f0xJtpvHYTVQ88B 5y agoARM does develop their own core designs which they license to many companies. However, they have several different licenses available which range from using ARM's designs, tweaking ARM's designs, up to the Architectural license which allows companies to develop their own ARM ISA compatible cores own their own. Apple is one of the companies which has an Architectural license. The current cores used by Apple were designed by Apple and not based on designs from ARM.