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Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
- Taniwha 4y ago10 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
- kmeisthax 4y agoOne thing to note is that RISC-V is only royalty-free for people making custom silicon implementations - i.e. the equivalent of an ARM architectural license. You still have to design the cores and that's the really hard part, moreso than designing the ISA. Apple is in a unique position where they have all these Cortex cores for various reasons, but also have the resources to actually design a RISC-V implementation that could replace them all. I doubt the people designing flash controller ICs have that level of design experience.
- WatchDog 4y agoThere seem to be a bunch of open source risc-v cores. Such as the CORE-V cores. However I’m not sure how suitable they are for commercial use compared to the proprietary options.
- snvzz 4y ago>You still have to design the cores and that's the really hard part, moreso than designing the ISA. Designing them is an option. RISC-V's license allows doing so. But, unlike ARM, where your only alternative is to license ARM's own designs, in RISC-V there are several options. You could use open source cores, or license cores from someone. As there's an open market of cores, there are several competing companies, offering several competing cores and support arrangements.
- Taniwha 4y agoThere's lots of open source RISC-V cores - but can't be any fully OS ARM ones (even if someone's made a n OS ARM core you still have to pay ARM a royalty) The big advantage to rolling your own private ISA is that there's already a rich compiler and O/S ecosystem for RISC-V while if you do use RISC-V it's all already there for you. It really does feel like a second generation 'barn raising'
- Someone 4y ago> but can't be any fully OS ARM ones (even if someone's made an OS ARM core you still have to pay ARM a royalty) Wait long enough and you can. Even if you can’t work around them, patents expire, and you can copy the instruction set for reasons of compatibility. Trademarks don’t automatically expire, though, so unless the trademark gets genericized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark) what you can’t do is call it an ARM CPU.
- londons_explore 4y agoArm will still blacklist you if you pull this trick. And being blacklisted by ARM might hurt your business when you do actually need to buy something from them.
- snvzz 4y ago>when you do actually need to buy something from them. Protip: You don't. Literally, just license whatever you need elsewhere. RISC-V has an open market of cores, with tens of companies and hundreds of offerings.
- phire 4y agoThe article is wrong, Apple don't really use ARM's Cortex cores within the M1 They already have a their own custom low-power arm64 core design for running these firmware tasks. They have about a dozen of them scattered around the M1, on top of the massive P and E cores. There are still a few actual ARM inc designed cores spread around the motherboard, in various devices. But inside the SoC, most (if not all) are Apple's own design.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y agoThe RV arch is much simpler than ARM and there are many more options in the market for licencing designs, besides the option of designing your own. That's the real difference: RV is a real market with multiple vendors whereas ARM arch is more or less single vendor lock-in.
- userbinator 4y agoIt's more likely that RISC-V replaces MIPS than ARM, although it's certainly competing for the latter too. ...and USB flash drives are more likely to be based on 8051s than ARM in volume.
- arcticbull 4y agoI'm pretty sure they're all ARM. Why would they be 8051s? Are there any sufficiently performant 8051 cores?
- userbinator 4y agoHere's one with a 250MHz 8051: https://github.com/flowswitch/phison/wiki/PS2303 https://github.com/flowswitch/phison/wiki/PS2303 They don't need anything as powerful as ARM (and thus avoid the licensing fees), and it's a very price-sensitive market, so a fast 8051 + accelerator hardware is enough. No doubt some of the more expensive ones may be ARM-based, but I think the 8051-based ones far outsell them in volume.
- sitkack 4y agoRV32 will turn out to be the 8051 of the present. The 8051 was the Doge Dart of embedded automation. I bought a book in Vietnamese in Vietnam in 2005 on embedded development hardware and software for the 8051. If the diagrams were any indication of the quality, the writing was excellent.
- userbinator 4y agoI highly doubt it. As "reduced" as RISC-V is, 8051 is still tiny in comparison. 8051s are used in applications where a 4-bit MCU (yes, they do exist and are still in widespread use) is not quite enough, or they'd have chosen one of those instead.
- jpfr 4y agoThere's a community doing "fpga golf". That is, reducing the number of LUT required to implement a CPU of a given ISA. A basic RV32 CPU is down to 500-700 LUT. https://github.com/YosysHQ/picorv32 https://github.com/olofk/serv A minimal 8051 requires about 300 LUT. https://github.com/MicroCoreLabs/Projects/tree/master/MCL51 Not sure how this translates from an FPGA to a transistor count. But RV32 and 8051 should be within a factor of 2-3.
- mhh__ 4y agoShipped last year or shipped in total?
- xiphias2 4y agoLast year 3B, and the total cores shipped got over 10B recently. I couldn't find more data though.
- kats 4y agoOk I looked into this some more. They said "We estimate there are 10bn cores on the market already" (that would be since 2010). Then there's a slide that says "Nearly 80 billion RISC-V CPU cores by 2025". https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/europe-steps-up-as-risc-v-ships-10bn-cores/ https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/europe-steps-up-as-risc-v-sh... that's from a talk at Embedded World in june 2022. I can't find that talk on youtube. But there's another shorter talk that's online, from same CEO at the same conference, where they have a slide that says "North America. Industry adoption has taken off with millions of cores shipping from Nvidia, Western Digital, SiFive, and others."
- kevmoo1 4y agoI wish I could buy stock in RISC-V (in the abstract). See also today: https://twitter.com/SiFive/status/1570880204804849671 https://twitter.com/SiFive/status/1570880204804849671
- snvzz 4y agoIf there was a RISC-V ETF, internally using companies that sell RISC-V IP and hardware, I'd definitely buy it, and prefer it over NASDAQ (QQQ).
- rwmj 4y agoCould you join VC funds which are investing in Rivos/Ventana/SiFive/etc? (Genuine question - I have no idea if this is possible or not) A lot of the RISC-V action is going on in China which is obviously rather more difficult. Over there much of that is funded by the Chinese state.
- snvzz 4y agoTesting the waters. Notably, Apple was among main investors when ARM was a startup; they're not doing this to save in ARM fees.
- systemvoltage 4y agoJim Keller's slide [1] on RISC-V. Simple words. Grug like. [1] https://www.techgoing.com/jim-keller-innovation-is-happening-risc-v-will-win/ https://www.techgoing.com/jim-keller-innovation-is-happening...
- beebeepka 4y agoI wish I could invest in his company. He's obviously biased towards RISC-V but things are certainly going this way.
- Jtsummers 4y agoThis is a two paragraph, highly speculative "summary" of [0] which was posted earlier [1]. But even reading the original article, it barely mentions Apple and CharlesW highly editorialized that submissions title: The Apple bit: > For example, Apple’s A15 has more than a dozen Arm-based CPU cores distributed across the die for various non-user-facing functions. SemiAnalysis can confirm that these cores are actively being converted to RISC-V in future generations of hardware. The original title: > SiFive Powers Google TPU, NASA, Tenstorrent, Renesas, Microchip, And More The bulk of the article is about Google and hyping Risk-V, not Apple. [0] https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/sifive-powers-google-tpu-nasa-tenstorrent https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/sifive-powers-google-tpu... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872927
- Melatonic 4y agoBit of a RISC-Y manoeuvrer no? *Badumph*
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThey had a job posting a few months ago which asked for RISC-V experience. edit: they still have them. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200349341/system-architect-hw-sw-architecture https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200349341/system-archit...
- tiffanyh 4y agoWhat benefits does RISC-V have over ARM besides it being open/free?
- teitoklien 4y agoWhat benefits does Linux/BSD have over Windows, as a highly productive development environment outside of all the possibilities it had opened by being open/free ?
- sitkack 4y agosmaller instruction set, Arm has grown, reference manual is over 6k pages smaller easier to read specs easier to get new features ratified, org is a steward, isn't seeking rents easy to add custom instructions lots of OSH implementations to choose from large 3rd party ecosystem, IP, compilers, OS, etc.
- cestith 4y agoTo be fair, even with a closed ecosystem for the cores themselves there is a large third party ecosystem in compilers, OSes, support hardware, and documentation around ARM these days. It's interesting how quickly all of that popped up around RISC-V the past few years though. ARM has had decades getting where they are with the ecosystem around their cores.
- 4y ago
- dagmx 4y agoThis is based on Dylan Patel’s speculation, and he quite commonly just comes up with something that he wants to be reality and presents it as fact.
- ddingus 4y agoApple end game: Apple ISA. Might take them a decade, but in the end, they will eventually do all their own thing.
- thebitstick 4y agoriscv64gc-apple-darwin