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You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller. A company

You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller. A company can take it upon itself to design a high-end processor for servers and be successful (like Apple did for user machines) but it's certain it won't choose the ARM arch, that would make no sense. Now that the RV arch is established and growing it's inevitable that it will be the arch of choice, because no-one in their right mind is going to tie their hands and donate money to ARM for nothing useful in return. Yes, CPUs are expensive to design, but it's amazing what a free and functioning market can produce. We're about to find out exactly what.

klelatti 4y ago
Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. "Nothing useful in return" isn't correct. There is clearly a lot of Arm IP on offer to licensees - eg see Amazon and Graviton. I get the enthusiasm for RISC-V and its great in many ways but some of the 'boosterism' doesn't do it any favours.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  The Nuvia people had just spent years developing high performance ARM cores (for Apple) and as a small company obviously want a ready market for their designs. By "nothing in return" I mean if you want to design a CPU from scratch, what exactly are you getting from licensing the ARM arch? Software compatibility? That doesn't mean anything for servers where compatibility is largely a recompile away. Of course ARM is a huge supplier of IP and their ability to design processors in not question, but they only supply IP for one arch which they control. If you want to design something different you must get ARM's permission and they have proven to be fickle about that. It's not "boosterism" is a real and hard fact that freedom for the fundamental parts of any class of technology means that a vibrant ecosystem can flourish around it. That's the fundamental difference here and the technical challenges have proven not to be a barrier.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    By all accounts Nuvia got substantial help (and probably quite a bit of IP) from Arm and I imagine that would be the case for any architectural licensee - they weren't just get sent a copy of the ISA spec and left to it! So 'nothing in return' just isn't true.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. Nuvia chose ARM way because RISC-V spec wasn't there yet, for what they were trying to do. The RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified in 2019. Vector extension, hypervisor extension and a bunch other important ones were ratified... in December 2021. Nuvia wouldn't pick ARM today. Plus, with the ongoing ARM-Qualcomm lawsuit, we'll have to see whether Qualcomm's future server chips remain ARM.
qwytw 4y ago
> You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. Software seems to be very different from hardware. How would a company like Red Hat, Canonical or basically almost every enterprise company which primarily relies on Linux/OSS/GNU products make money from RISC-V? The cost of entry is much higher and there is no clear way of building a business around open source RISC-V (yet) > The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller Yes. But why would anyone who which was capable of building a high-end RISC-V core give their design away for free? Unless there is a clear incentive for them to do that it’s objectively worse than the current situation where anyone can license a high-end CPU design from ARM. > like Apple did for user machines) but it's certain it won't choose the ARM arch Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM? > that would make no sense Why? As long as the cost of designing such a processor remains very high, there are no open source designs available and it’s cheaper to build on top of what ARM than build it from scratch it makes perfect sense. I mean in principle I agree with you. It would be great if CPU design was open source, anyone could take a high end core design improve on top of it and then share their changes with everyone but I don’t see a clear path to that. Instead companies might just take what they can from the OSS community and contribute nothing back. ARM seems like a somewhat decent but far from perfect solution for this (as long as it remains independent)
- snvzz 4y ago
  >Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM? You mean the M1? I'm fairly sure this was designed even before the RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified. It was ratified in 2019, by the way. The batch of extensions ratified by the end of 2021 contains important featuresets like vector or hypervisor support. So, of course they didn't pick RISC-V back then. Yet, nobody in their right mind would pick ARM today.
  - afiori 4y ago
    Leaving aside the merits of the two ISAs, for Apple using ARM for the M1 had the huge advantage unifying all their devices to a single ISA. Based on just that (and the fact that they own a perpetual license to all things ARM) they would likely make the same choice now and even in a couple of years.
ksec 4y ago
>You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. And people from the 90s told me Linux will take over Desktop.

klelatti 4y ago

Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. "Nothing useful in return" isn't correct. There is clearly a lot of Arm IP on offer to licensees - eg see Amazon and Graviton. I get the enthusiasm for RISC-V and its great in many ways but some of the 'boosterism' doesn't do it any favours.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
The Nuvia people had just spent years developing high performance ARM cores (for Apple) and as a small company obviously want a ready market for their designs. By "nothing in return" I mean if you want to design a CPU from scratch, what exactly are you getting from licensing the ARM arch? Software compatibility? That doesn't mean anything for servers where compatibility is largely a recompile away. Of course ARM is a huge supplier of IP and their ability to design processors in not question, but they only supply IP for one arch which they control. If you want to design something different you must get ARM's permission and they have proven to be fickle about that. It's not "boosterism" is a real and hard fact that freedom for the fundamental parts of any class of technology means that a vibrant ecosystem can flourish around it. That's the fundamental difference here and the technical challenges have proven not to be a barrier.
- klelatti 4y ago
  By all accounts Nuvia got substantial help (and probably quite a bit of IP) from Arm and I imagine that would be the case for any architectural licensee - they weren't just get sent a copy of the ISA spec and left to it! So 'nothing in return' just isn't true.
snvzz 4y ago
>Nuvia chose Arm when RISC-V was available. Nuvia chose ARM way because RISC-V spec wasn't there yet, for what they were trying to do. The RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified in 2019. Vector extension, hypervisor extension and a bunch other important ones were ratified... in December 2021. Nuvia wouldn't pick ARM today. Plus, with the ongoing ARM-Qualcomm lawsuit, we'll have to see whether Qualcomm's future server chips remain ARM.

qwytw 4y ago

> You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. Software seems to be very different from hardware. How would a company like Red Hat, Canonical or basically almost every enterprise company which primarily relies on Linux/OSS/GNU products make money from RISC-V? The cost of entry is much higher and there is no clear way of building a business around open source RISC-V (yet) > The bottom line is that ARM represents vendor lock-in and broken market with only one seller Yes. But why would anyone who which was capable of building a high-end RISC-V core give their design away for free? Unless there is a clear incentive for them to do that it’s objectively worse than the current situation where anyone can license a high-end CPU design from ARM. > like Apple did for user machines) but it's certain it won't choose the ARM arch Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM? > that would make no sense Why? As long as the cost of designing such a processor remains very high, there are no open source designs available and it’s cheaper to build on top of what ARM than build it from scratch it makes perfect sense. I mean in principle I agree with you. It would be great if CPU design was open source, anyone could take a high end core design improve on top of it and then share their changes with everyone but I don’t see a clear path to that. Instead companies might just take what they can from the OSS community and contribute nothing back. ARM seems like a somewhat decent but far from perfect solution for this (as long as it remains independent)

snvzz 4y ago
>Right, except in the one case where they did choose ARM? You mean the M1? I'm fairly sure this was designed even before the RISC-V base spec, the unprivileged one (no supervisor vs user, or MMU), was ratified. It was ratified in 2019, by the way. The batch of extensions ratified by the end of 2021 contains important featuresets like vector or hypervisor support. So, of course they didn't pick RISC-V back then. Yet, nobody in their right mind would pick ARM today.
- afiori 4y ago
  Leaving aside the merits of the two ISAs, for Apple using ARM for the M1 had the huge advantage unifying all their devices to a single ISA. Based on just that (and the fact that they own a perpetual license to all things ARM) they would likely make the same choice now and even in a couple of years.

ksec 4y ago

>You sound like someone from the 90's dismissing Linux. And people from the 90s told me Linux will take over Desktop.