4 ms·

Is there a good overview somewhere of what the realistic path to market is for it? I don't mean this as sass— I'm genuinely curious. As far as I'm aware there a

Is there a good overview somewhere of what the realistic path to market is for it? I don't mean this as sass— I'm genuinely curious. As far as I'm aware there are only a handful of real chips/devkits available at this point; mostly it's still people synthesizing cores on FPGAs. Basically the whole story looks pretty experimental. I know "can I buy it on Digi-Key" is irrelevant to an entity like Google or Apple, but I feel like hobbyist accessibility is at least something of a proxy for general readiness.

zi0 4y ago
In August, Intel announced Intel® PathFinder to bootstrap (thanks to the pre-silicon development environment) the adoption of RISC-V, FYI. FPGAs everywhere https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-intel-team-up-to-accelerate-risc-v-adoption-introducing-intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-intel-corporation/ https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-inte...
kragen 4y ago
I think Western Digital has been shipping disk drives driven by RISC-V microcontrollers in volume for years. I think they won't sell you the microcontrollers, but they definitely aren't the only company doing this, just the loudest. They do offer their designs as free IP cores https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open-source/risc-v https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open... and apparently run Linux on some of them: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus This last article says, "Since the storage company isn’t a traditional IP vendor, it has worked with Codasip to support its CPU licensees. Including [WD's] Swerv cores and other open-source designs, Codasip has helped customers ship two billion RISC-V chips over the past few years." (Emphasis mine.) But I think instead of "an entity like Google or Apple", or even WD, you should be thinking "an entity like Baidu, Huawei, or AliBaba". The strongest RISC-V story is a Chinese national security thing, and it works like this. — ⁂ — Most computer hardware has been designed and assembled in the PRC for several years now. In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and since 02020 the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. These sanctions deprived Huawei of access to chips from TSMC in Taiwan, even though Taiwan is nominally not under US jurisdiction. Computer hardware relies heavily on trade with Taiwan and other countries, including, in particular, MCUs and CPUs fabricated at TSMC in Taiwan using designs licensed from ARM. ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. Using a component makes you vulnerable to backdoors inserted by the component's manufacturer or, if you do not understand its design, its designer. Such backdoors are known to have been a major instrument of US foreign policy in the past (the Crypto AG affair) and presumably still are. The Huawei sanctions were justified by allegations that the PRC is doing the same thing. There are rumors that some manufacturers in the PRC are experiencing a new "onshore mandate" that prohibits foreign-sourced components, at least in some products; quoting https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-risc-v-mcu-offers-2kb-sram-16kb-flash-in-sop8-to-qfn20-packages/#comment-599328 https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri...: > [the WCH CH32V003 is] quite timely as we were forced by HQ last Friday to revise all product line designs to comply with 100% Chinese domestic semiconductors & passive components by latest Q4 end. All western sourced/accounts and parts are now forbidden, apart from those sourced by HQ’s registered jurisdiction. > Worth adding to the list, we’ve also signed accounts with GigaDevice and Expressif Shanghai in the MCU and connectivity range. — ⁂ — So that's the problem to solve. RISC-V already offers PRC manufacturers a path to building ARM-competitive MCUs and low-end CPUs which can be legally sold overseas and which comply with this onshore mandate. As a bonus, they can be sold at prices several times cheaper than any ARM alternative; WCH's CH32V003 is reputedly 10¢, though LCSC doesn't seem to have them in stock yet. Presumably, until SMIC (or another domestic alternative) can move up to more modern process nodes, fully-sanctions-proof versions of these chips will be larger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than TSMC-manufactured chips. But for many applications this doesn't matter. The Allwinner D1, using a RISC-V design from the Honey Badger open-source hardware subsidiary of AliBaba, is already performance-competitive with early Raspberry Pis, though I think that performance relies on TSMC. In 3–5 years RISC-V might be able to move up to today's desktop or laptop CPUs, and SMIC might be able to fabricate things at early Raspberry Pi performance levels (22 nm? Something past the end of Dennard scaling, anyway). — ⁂ — Also, though, you shouldn't totally dismiss the FPGA cores. FPGAs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, thanks to Lattice. It's true that an ASIC MCU will always be faster than an FPGA fabbed in the same process running a softcore, but it may not have the peripherals you need, and there are a lot of applications where we run an MCU at a 32768 Hz clock to save power, so clock speed isn't everything. Olof Kindgren's bit-serial RISC-V core SeRV https://github.com/olofk/serv https://github.com/olofk/serv reputedly fits into 200 4-LUTs like those in the Lattice iCE40LP384, which would cost US$1.82–2.15 at Digi-Key if they had any: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40LP384-SG32/3974680 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semicondu... and that would leave you another 184 LUTs for peripherals. You can get MCUs a lot cheaper than US$2 but US$2 is still within the budget for a lot of projects. Every year there are more and more custom ASICs from more and more companies, and a lot of them include some kind of microcontroller core to orchestrate their activities. Historically this has often been something like an 8051 or Z80, but switching it to RISC-V seems likely to lower development costs significantly, especially if a tiny RV32I core like SeRV or the smaller configurations of PicoRV32 would be adequate.
- kragen 4y ago
  Looks like we'll have modern-cellphone-level RISC-V shipping next year: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11/02/sifive-p670-and-p470-risc-v-processors-add-risc-v-vector-extensions/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11/02/sifive-p670-and-p470...
- mmcgaha 4y ago
  > In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies Using long now years really makes this harder to read. When a year is within text, there really isn't any reason to format it to be sorted by a machine. No one is confused by the year 300 when they see today so why would some future person be confused when they see 2019?
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    It does have a use: I see one of these, am momentarily confused, then go “oh it’s ‘kragen again”.
    - kragen 4y ago
      The HN equivalent of having a mohawk, I guess.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. FWIW, Allen Wu was finally ousted by leveraging that right to license, i.e. SoftBank's threatening to not release new IP rights to ARM China. SoftBank was somehow further able to wrest back control of ARM China from Wu by cleverly transferring its stake to a SPV jointly owned by SoftBank and ARM, so ARM China is considered a "financial investment interest" rather than a subsidiary.[1] [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBank-wrested-back-control-of-Arm-China https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBa...
  - kragen 4y ago
t-3 4y ago
There are a quite a few RISC-V chips consumers can buy right now, but mostly MCUs (which are the majority of the market, just not the highly visible or exciting part of it). Higher-powered "PC-grade" chips and dev-boards are coming slowly, and the next year or so should bring a few new entrants, but I wouldn't expect to see a lot of them. Server/mainframe class probably won't be seen for a long time, if ever. It obviously takes longer to develop bigger chips, as well as being a far less attractive market for new entrants.
brucehoult 4y ago
Hobbyists have a few very cheap RISC-V things they can buy. Check out boards with the Espressif ESP32-C3 or Bouffalo Lab BL602, for example. These are both user-programmable WIFI/BT chips running at 200 MHz or so and with a couple of hundred KB of RAM. They sell for a couple of dollars. There are also 1 GHz 512 MB Linux boards similar to Raspberry Pi Zero selling for $15 to $30, depending on features. According to RISC-V International back in June, 10 billion chips have shipped with RISC-V cores in them. Several individual companies have stood up and said they (or their clients) have shipped in the billions each. It often takes 4 to 5 years from a decision to make a CPU core, to having a design that works in simulation (and on FPGA), to having a working test chip, to fixing any minor bugs and moving into mass production, to having the chip integrated into someone's product/board, and manufactured and delivered to customers or shops. Especially as you move up the performance and complexity scale. This is not just for RISC-V but for anything. The first ever RISC-V core, in a chip, on a board went on sale in December 2016, less than six years ago. That was the Arduino-style HiFive1 with a 320 MHz 32 bit E31 core (Berkeley Rocket, basically). It performed competitively with ARM Cortex-M3 devices at the same MHz -- except those topped out at 180 MHz. About 15 months later (about 4 1/2 years ago) the 1.5 GHz single-issue quad core 64 bit 8 GB RAM Linux-running HiFive Unleashed went on sale. Benchmarks (e.g. https://hoult.org/primes.txt https://hoult.org/primes.txt) put it within about 10% of a DUAL issue ARM Cortex-A53 (in e.g. Raspberry Pi 3) on a clock for clock basis -- except, again, it could run at higher MHz. Companies that made a decision to create high performance (e.g. wide OoO) RISC-V cores in early 2018 when the HiFive Unleashed came out would likely be JUST NOW getting close to releasing a product for end users. Except most such companies would have made the decision several years later than that. Rivos, for example, was founded by ex-Apple A-series and M1 ex-PA Semi people in May 2021, three years after the HiFive Unleashed came out, and about the same time as the Unleashed's successor, the dual-issue HiFive Unmatched came out. This month, the first mass-produced low cost quad core RISC-V board, the VisionFive 2, is starting to ship to early customers at near Raspberry Pi prices. It is a quad core dual-issue 1.5 GHz 64 bit Linux-running board with on-chip Imagination Tech GPU, on-board M.2 slot for SSD (or SD or eMMC if you prefer). Standard retail price is $55, $65, or $85 depending on whether you want 2, 4, or 8 GB RAM. Early-bird pricing was about 20% less. Performance is about the same as an ARM A-55 running at the same clock speed, or about 80% as fast as the older OoO A72 cores in the Raspberry Pi 4. However the GPU is up to 4x faster than the GPU in the Pi 4, so the desktop experience should actually be better, at least once the software matures. In September Intel demonstrated a board with their RISC-V "Horse Creek" chip running at 2.2 GHz. It offers performance in the same ballpark with the ARM Cortex-A76 based RK3588 boards that started selling for $150 to $250 back in April or May. SiFive has said that their (not yet named) successor to the HiFive Unmatched will be using this chip. I would not be surprised if SiFive says more about that tomorrow in their presentation at the Linley Fall Processor Conference. In any case it will be just a few months away. RISC-V chips with performance similar to the Apple M1 (and Intel 10th gen and AMD Zen 2) are in the pipeline.

zi0 4y ago

In August, Intel announced Intel® PathFinder to bootstrap (thanks to the pre-silicon development environment) the adoption of RISC-V, FYI. FPGAs everywhere https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-intel-team-up-to-accelerate-risc-v-adoption-introducing-intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-intel-corporation/ https://riscv.org/blog/2022/08/risc-v-international-and-inte...

kragen 4y ago

I think Western Digital has been shipping disk drives driven by RISC-V microcontrollers in volume for years. I think they won't sell you the microcontrollers, but they definitely aren't the only company doing this, just the loudest. They do offer their designs as free IP cores https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open-source/risc-v https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/company/innovation/open... and apparently run Linux on some of them: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus https://www.techinsights.com/blog/wd-licenses-risc-v-cpus This last article says, "Since the storage company isn’t a traditional IP vendor, it has worked with Codasip to support its CPU licensees. Including [WD's] Swerv cores and other open-source designs, Codasip has helped customers ship two billion RISC-V chips over the past few years." (Emphasis mine.) But I think instead of "an entity like Google or Apple", or even WD, you should be thinking "an entity like Baidu, Huawei, or AliBaba". The strongest RISC-V story is a Chinese national security thing, and it works like this. — ⁂ — Most computer hardware has been designed and assembled in the PRC for several years now. In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and since 02020 the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. These sanctions deprived Huawei of access to chips from TSMC in Taiwan, even though Taiwan is nominally not under US jurisdiction. Computer hardware relies heavily on trade with Taiwan and other countries, including, in particular, MCUs and CPUs fabricated at TSMC in Taiwan using designs licensed from ARM. ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. Using a component makes you vulnerable to backdoors inserted by the component's manufacturer or, if you do not understand its design, its designer. Such backdoors are known to have been a major instrument of US foreign policy in the past (the Crypto AG affair) and presumably still are. The Huawei sanctions were justified by allegations that the PRC is doing the same thing. There are rumors that some manufacturers in the PRC are experiencing a new "onshore mandate" that prohibits foreign-sourced components, at least in some products; quoting https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-risc-v-mcu-offers-2kb-sram-16kb-flash-in-sop8-to-qfn20-packages/#comment-599328 https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/10/22/10-cents-ch32v003-ri...: > [the WCH CH32V003 is] quite timely as we were forced by HQ last Friday to revise all product line designs to comply with 100% Chinese domestic semiconductors & passive components by latest Q4 end. All western sourced/accounts and parts are now forbidden, apart from those sourced by HQ’s registered jurisdiction. > Worth adding to the list, we’ve also signed accounts with GigaDevice and Expressif Shanghai in the MCU and connectivity range. — ⁂ — So that's the problem to solve. RISC-V already offers PRC manufacturers a path to building ARM-competitive MCUs and low-end CPUs which can be legally sold overseas and which comply with this onshore mandate. As a bonus, they can be sold at prices several times cheaper than any ARM alternative; WCH's CH32V003 is reputedly 10¢, though LCSC doesn't seem to have them in stock yet. Presumably, until SMIC (or another domestic alternative) can move up to more modern process nodes, fully-sanctions-proof versions of these chips will be larger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than TSMC-manufactured chips. But for many applications this doesn't matter. The Allwinner D1, using a RISC-V design from the Honey Badger open-source hardware subsidiary of AliBaba, is already performance-competitive with early Raspberry Pis, though I think that performance relies on TSMC. In 3–5 years RISC-V might be able to move up to today's desktop or laptop CPUs, and SMIC might be able to fabricate things at early Raspberry Pi performance levels (22 nm? Something past the end of Dennard scaling, anyway). — ⁂ — Also, though, you shouldn't totally dismiss the FPGA cores. FPGAs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, thanks to Lattice. It's true that an ASIC MCU will always be faster than an FPGA fabbed in the same process running a softcore, but it may not have the peripherals you need, and there are a lot of applications where we run an MCU at a 32768 Hz clock to save power, so clock speed isn't everything. Olof Kindgren's bit-serial RISC-V core SeRV https://github.com/olofk/serv https://github.com/olofk/serv reputedly fits into 200 4-LUTs like those in the Lattice iCE40LP384, which would cost US$1.82–2.15 at Digi-Key if they had any: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semiconductor-corporation/ICE40LP384-SG32/3974680 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/lattice-semicondu... and that would leave you another 184 LUTs for peripherals. You can get MCUs a lot cheaper than US$2 but US$2 is still within the budget for a lot of projects. Every year there are more and more custom ASICs from more and more companies, and a lot of them include some kind of microcontroller core to orchestrate their activities. Historically this has often been something like an 8051 or Z80, but switching it to RISC-V seems likely to lower development costs significantly, especially if a tiny RV32I core like SeRV or the smaller configurations of PicoRV32 would be adequate.

kragen 4y ago
Looks like we'll have modern-cellphone-level RISC-V shipping next year: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11/02/sifive-p670-and-p470-risc-v-processors-add-risc-v-vector-extensions/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/11/02/sifive-p670-and-p470...
mmcgaha 4y ago
> In 02019 the USG imposed heavy sanctions on a number of PRC hardware companies Using long now years really makes this harder to read. When a year is within text, there really isn't any reason to format it to be sorted by a machine. No one is confused by the year 300 when they see today so why would some future person be confused when they see 2019?
- saagarjha 4y ago
  It does have a use: I see one of these, am momentarily confused, then go “oh it’s ‘kragen again”.
  - kragen 4y ago
    The HN equivalent of having a mohawk, I guess.
Maursault 4y ago
> ARM China, a former ARM subsidiary, has the legal right to license ARM designs for use within China but not overseas. FWIW, Allen Wu was finally ousted by leveraging that right to license, i.e. SoftBank's threatening to not release new IP rights to ARM China. SoftBank was somehow further able to wrest back control of ARM China from Wu by cleverly transferring its stake to a SPV jointly owned by SoftBank and ARM, so ARM China is considered a "financial investment interest" rather than a subsidiary.[1] [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBank-wrested-back-control-of-Arm-China https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/In-Depth-How-SoftBa...
- kragen 4y ago

t-3 4y ago

There are a quite a few RISC-V chips consumers can buy right now, but mostly MCUs (which are the majority of the market, just not the highly visible or exciting part of it). Higher-powered "PC-grade" chips and dev-boards are coming slowly, and the next year or so should bring a few new entrants, but I wouldn't expect to see a lot of them. Server/mainframe class probably won't be seen for a long time, if ever. It obviously takes longer to develop bigger chips, as well as being a far less attractive market for new entrants.

brucehoult 4y ago

Hobbyists have a few very cheap RISC-V things they can buy. Check out boards with the Espressif ESP32-C3 or Bouffalo Lab BL602, for example. These are both user-programmable WIFI/BT chips running at 200 MHz or so and with a couple of hundred KB of RAM. They sell for a couple of dollars. There are also 1 GHz 512 MB Linux boards similar to Raspberry Pi Zero selling for $15 to $30, depending on features. According to RISC-V International back in June, 10 billion chips have shipped with RISC-V cores in them. Several individual companies have stood up and said they (or their clients) have shipped in the billions each. It often takes 4 to 5 years from a decision to make a CPU core, to having a design that works in simulation (and on FPGA), to having a working test chip, to fixing any minor bugs and moving into mass production, to having the chip integrated into someone's product/board, and manufactured and delivered to customers or shops. Especially as you move up the performance and complexity scale. This is not just for RISC-V but for anything. The first ever RISC-V core, in a chip, on a board went on sale in December 2016, less than six years ago. That was the Arduino-style HiFive1 with a 320 MHz 32 bit E31 core (Berkeley Rocket, basically). It performed competitively with ARM Cortex-M3 devices at the same MHz -- except those topped out at 180 MHz. About 15 months later (about 4 1/2 years ago) the 1.5 GHz single-issue quad core 64 bit 8 GB RAM Linux-running HiFive Unleashed went on sale. Benchmarks (e.g. https://hoult.org/primes.txt https://hoult.org/primes.txt) put it within about 10% of a DUAL issue ARM Cortex-A53 (in e.g. Raspberry Pi 3) on a clock for clock basis -- except, again, it could run at higher MHz. Companies that made a decision to create high performance (e.g. wide OoO) RISC-V cores in early 2018 when the HiFive Unleashed came out would likely be JUST NOW getting close to releasing a product for end users. Except most such companies would have made the decision several years later than that. Rivos, for example, was founded by ex-Apple A-series and M1 ex-PA Semi people in May 2021, three years after the HiFive Unleashed came out, and about the same time as the Unleashed's successor, the dual-issue HiFive Unmatched came out. This month, the first mass-produced low cost quad core RISC-V board, the VisionFive 2, is starting to ship to early customers at near Raspberry Pi prices. It is a quad core dual-issue 1.5 GHz 64 bit Linux-running board with on-chip Imagination Tech GPU, on-board M.2 slot for SSD (or SD or eMMC if you prefer). Standard retail price is $55, $65, or $85 depending on whether you want 2, 4, or 8 GB RAM. Early-bird pricing was about 20% less. Performance is about the same as an ARM A-55 running at the same clock speed, or about 80% as fast as the older OoO A72 cores in the Raspberry Pi 4. However the GPU is up to 4x faster than the GPU in the Pi 4, so the desktop experience should actually be better, at least once the software matures. In September Intel demonstrated a board with their RISC-V "Horse Creek" chip running at 2.2 GHz. It offers performance in the same ballpark with the ARM Cortex-A76 based RK3588 boards that started selling for $150 to $250 back in April or May. SiFive has said that their (not yet named) successor to the HiFive Unmatched will be using this chip. I would not be surprised if SiFive says more about that tomorrow in their presentation at the Linley Fall Processor Conference. In any case it will be just a few months away. RISC-V chips with performance similar to the Apple M1 (and Intel 10th gen and AMD Zen 2) are in the pipeline.