4 ms·

RISC-V is certainly a great option for low cost controllers because you can just slot in an existing design cheaply with minimal customisation. Most application

by simonh 4y ago

RISC-V is certainly a great option for low cost controllers because you can just slot in an existing design cheaply with minimal customisation. Most applications for ARM and RISC-V use existing standard base core designs to which you add whatever mix of additional components you need. So the real question is, where is the investment in the open RISC-V core architecture coming from? That’s what will push RISC-V forward. With ARM every time a small design house drops an ARM core into a SOC they pay a fee that funds further ARM architecture development. That’s not so with RISC-V. None of those Chinese design houses are making any significant investment in advancing the state of the art in RISC-V core design. Also those private shops that do innovate on the RISC-V core architecture don’t necessarily have an interest in open sourcing their improvements. So I suppose we’ll see. As is often the case it’s not so much the technical issues that will decide the matter but the investment and funding model for the open core architecture.

zozbot234 4y ago
Core architecture is the easiest part actually, there's plenty of high-level core designs available in the open. Turning that broad architecture into real products is a lot more challenging, and is where shops like e.g. SiFive can thrive. But that's just how fabbing chips works, it applies to RISC-V as much as anything else. And we'll probably see even more openness than that at the trailing edge of chip fabrication - the relevant segment for e.g. commodity embedded parts, where there's a far better understanding of processes and design rules.
londons_explore 4y ago
> private shops that do innovate on the RISC-V core architecture don’t necessarily have an interest in open sourcing their improvements. Most stuff in China is 'open sourced' through extensive code leaks, even for silicon designs. There are websites designed for downloading your competitors code. Most cheap products from China I have no difficulty locating at least some source code for. Getting it to build on the other hand is a totally different ball game...
- qwytw 4y ago
  It's sounds like there is very little incentive to for companies to invest significant resources into improvements in such an environment.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    You actually find the reverse - innovation is very fast, because when someone writes some code, that manufacturer can get their product to market perhaps 1 or 2 months before a competitor who has to wait for the product to hit the shelves or code to leak. So everyone needs to be constantly improving their product while also merging in innovations of all the competitors or be overtaken. Imagine the US patent system, and the way everyone copies a feature 20 years afterwards when the patent runs out. But now replace "20 years" with "2 months", and thats what it's like.
    - qwytw 4y ago
      So there zero incentive to invest into anything as long as it might take more than a couple of months for it to pay off? This might work on a small scale. But if find it hard to imagine that anyone would be willing to spend billions (or any large mount which would only payoff in several years) to develop some new product if they knew that that all their competitors can just copy it without paying anything and ship a much cheaper but otherwise identical product in less than half a year.
      - andyferris 4y ago
        I'm not a hardware guy... but... Take a piece of open-source software. An individual pull request takes no more than a couple months - usually much less. We still get a variety of hobbyists and businesses contributing, and over the years the OSS ecosystem gets better and better. Some software costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build but for these there is usually some open source alternative that's somewhere between "passable" and "much better". I'm imagining a world where you can take a RISC-V design (or equally, some software/firmware for a cheap piece of electronics) and a business can invest some days/weeks making a small improvement (for some benefit to their own cheap product) - or a hobbyist can choose to do it on the weekend. So long as that gets in the open somehow (open sourced or leaked) everyone can benefit. It's a whole different world than a once-every-year-to-18-months chip revision. A "pull request" might only optimize a tiny chunk of the die, but if the pace of contributions is large enough that can add up. Along the way there are still incentives for businesses to invest their time and money.
brucehoult 4y ago
Even in China most companies are licensing their RISC-V core. From Andes. From Alibaba's T-Head division. From StarFive (SiFive licensee). Those companies are all innovating in various directions. Most companies license a RISC-V core just as they would an ARM core. The difference is there is price and feature competition between different core creators.
- tyingq 4y ago
  ARM licenses are royalty based...some percentage of your produced product's value. I don't think any of the RISC-V licenses work that way.

by simonh 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

Core architecture is the easiest part actually, there's plenty of high-level core designs available in the open. Turning that broad architecture into real products is a lot more challenging, and is where shops like e.g. SiFive can thrive. But that's just how fabbing chips works, it applies to RISC-V as much as anything else. And we'll probably see even more openness than that at the trailing edge of chip fabrication - the relevant segment for e.g. commodity embedded parts, where there's a far better understanding of processes and design rules.

londons_explore 4y ago

> private shops that do innovate on the RISC-V core architecture don’t necessarily have an interest in open sourcing their improvements. Most stuff in China is 'open sourced' through extensive code leaks, even for silicon designs. There are websites designed for downloading your competitors code. Most cheap products from China I have no difficulty locating at least some source code for. Getting it to build on the other hand is a totally different ball game...

qwytw 4y ago
It's sounds like there is very little incentive to for companies to invest significant resources into improvements in such an environment.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  You actually find the reverse - innovation is very fast, because when someone writes some code, that manufacturer can get their product to market perhaps 1 or 2 months before a competitor who has to wait for the product to hit the shelves or code to leak. So everyone needs to be constantly improving their product while also merging in innovations of all the competitors or be overtaken. Imagine the US patent system, and the way everyone copies a feature 20 years afterwards when the patent runs out. But now replace "20 years" with "2 months", and thats what it's like.
  - qwytw 4y ago
    So there zero incentive to invest into anything as long as it might take more than a couple of months for it to pay off? This might work on a small scale. But if find it hard to imagine that anyone would be willing to spend billions (or any large mount which would only payoff in several years) to develop some new product if they knew that that all their competitors can just copy it without paying anything and ship a much cheaper but otherwise identical product in less than half a year.
    - andyferris 4y ago
      I'm not a hardware guy... but... Take a piece of open-source software. An individual pull request takes no more than a couple months - usually much less. We still get a variety of hobbyists and businesses contributing, and over the years the OSS ecosystem gets better and better. Some software costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build but for these there is usually some open source alternative that's somewhere between "passable" and "much better". I'm imagining a world where you can take a RISC-V design (or equally, some software/firmware for a cheap piece of electronics) and a business can invest some days/weeks making a small improvement (for some benefit to their own cheap product) - or a hobbyist can choose to do it on the weekend. So long as that gets in the open somehow (open sourced or leaked) everyone can benefit. It's a whole different world than a once-every-year-to-18-months chip revision. A "pull request" might only optimize a tiny chunk of the die, but if the pace of contributions is large enough that can add up. Along the way there are still incentives for businesses to invest their time and money.

brucehoult 4y ago

Even in China most companies are licensing their RISC-V core. From Andes. From Alibaba's T-Head division. From StarFive (SiFive licensee). Those companies are all innovating in various directions. Most companies license a RISC-V core just as they would an ARM core. The difference is there is price and feature competition between different core creators.

tyingq 4y ago
ARM licenses are royalty based...some percentage of your produced product's value. I don't think any of the RISC-V licenses work that way.