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Google wants RISC-V to be a “tier-1” Android architecture
- debatem1 4y agoYeah well they wanted Intel to be one too. I don't think you can buy a phone running x86 or x86_64 new anywhere, and that was back in the honeycomb timeframe.
- cma 4y agoYou can run android apps on x64 chromebooks though.
- RobotToaster 4y agoI was a little surprised the edison/galileo platform didn't takeoff, their main problem seemed to be zero documentation.
- snvzz 4y agoThat'd depend on who you ask. Many will tell you any RISC choice is better, and there's no reason to use x86 when not tied by having to be compatible with legacy applications.
- pantalaimon 4y agoIt was also much more expensive than comparable ARM chips with no benefits - in fact it came with the huge drawback that it was a completely new platform in that space.
- Exmoor 4y agoI had a Zenfone 2, which ran Marshmallow on the Intel chipset. Decent phone and I don't remember having many complaints other than it didn't support my carrier's wifi calling which ended up being a dealbreaker when I got moved to an office that doubled as a faraday cage.
- inhumantsar 4y agoI had a Zenfone 2 as well and my main complaint was battery life. It was definitely more power hungry than comparable competitors and not noticeably faster.
- lmm 4y agoYou can buy a Librem new (or rather any struggle struggle is because they're sold out, not because they're not being made) and it runs x86, though I don't think that undermines your point by much.
- preisschild 4y agoWhich Librem device are you talking about? Their smartphone (Librem 5) has 4 ARM Cortex A53 cores.
- babypuncher 4y agoI think that has more to do with Intel failing to offer any competitive chips in this space. The entire company seemingly assumed phones and tablets were just a fad and spent the better part of a decade treating AMD as their only competitor.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoFantastic… but on what? RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly. Is this going to primarily be the newest chipset for cheap Kindles?
- chriscappuccio 4y agoRead the article. They're preparing for RISC-V chips to take over the crown from ARM as ARM is not a stable company.
- stefan_ 4y agoMeanwhile, the RISC-V "ecosystem" is already a full shambles, with companies shipping chips implementing preliminary, not 1.0 released extensions and adding on their own proprietary extension instructions. It's like ARM before v7 or v8, only dumber, because at least ARM back then had an excuse for why they were fracturing it all so badly. Also, of course, ARM has lots of other IP you need to build a full-blown smartphone SoC; think GPU, display processors and pipelines, video accelerators, ... - to make a RISC-V smartphone you will have to buy all of those in because there is no "RISC-V ecosystem" replacement (and it's rather unlikely there ever will be) and at that point... what's the point anymore?
- anfilt 4y agoThe chips using preliminary/draft specs are annoying. However RISC-V has allocations dedicated in the ISA for vendor specific instructions which is fine. Code that does not use such extensions runs just fine
- snvzz 4y ago>The chips using preliminary/draft specs are annoying. They actually aren't annoying at all. Real world testing with actual chips is very helpful to the RISC-V Foundation and its extension development and ratification process.
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- snvzz 4y agoNo surprises there. RISC-V is the future, and Google itself already has some public RISC-V designs. The expectation is that some Pixel in not so distant future will debut with a highly competitive RISC-V SoC.
- bitL 4y agoThey are designing a new chip for their cloud...
- booi 4y agoDidn’t they just release their ARM virtual servers?
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- viraptor 4y agoThat's going to be interesting to see. Apple could pull off the change in infrastructure and tell devs to deal with it. But could Google do the same with lots of apps in the store which contain native code?
- izacus 4y agoNot sure what you're talking about here, Android supports 4 architectures right now (supported 6 before) and adding one more isn't such a big deal.
- viraptor 4y agoI know android itself can support multiple archs, but does a (random play store app with native library) support them or even test them all?
- kayson 4y agoOf course they do. No one wants to pay ARMs licensing fees but there isn't really any other marketable option.
- fbdab103 4y agoI hear this all the time, but are there any public numbers on how much money is spent on licensing? Are we talking pennies per chip (which adds up) or tens of dollars per shipped device? ARM was going to sell for "only" $40 billion, which makes me think that per device fees are low (there is an ARM chip in everything).
- hristov 4y agoARM reported 2.7 billion in revenues in fiscal 2021 (I cannot seem to find 2022 results easily).
- photonbeam 4y agoThats smaller than I expected for such a prominent company
- Namidairo 4y ago"2021 licensing (non-royalty) revenues were up 61% to $1.13Bn as our expanded product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access gave more customers more reasons and more ways to license Arm technology. 2021 royalty revenues were up 20% to a record $1.54Bn, helped by continuing strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers." Source: https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/05/arm-delivers-record-revenues-and-record-profits-in-fy21 https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/05/arm-delivers-record... The royalties are higher on the newer more complex designs, so the 29.2 billion chips number can't really be used to derive a proper price per chip. Don't even get people started on the perpetual and architectural licensing too.
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- amelius 4y agoThis is very consumer oriented thinking. Industry wants RISC-V too.
- charcircuit 4y agoHow does this help consumers? The main difference to consumers is that less apps will be available since they haven't been ported to RISC-V
- bigyikes 4y agoMaybe this is naive, but the way I see it is: more architectures = more room for innovation. Ultimately RISC-V will allow for more competition in the CPU space, driving down prices for consumers.
- giantrobot 4y agoReleasing some new competitive CPU is a billion+ dollar hurdle. No one is going to release a RISC-V competitor to any current top of the line CPUs without that minimum investment. Who is going to do that level in investment when buying licensed ARM cores is orders of magnitude cheaper?
- snvzz 4y ago>Releasing some new competitive CPU is a billion+ dollar hurdle. We are well past that hurdle. Competitive CPU designs have already been announced, and known funding for RISC-V is already in excess of 10 billion.
- hristov 4y agoI should note here that Apple designed and released their CPUs for mobile phones, tablets and PCs without buying ARM cores. They are still using and paying for the ARM ISA, but they designed their own cores. And their CPUs are widely held as better than the ones that use Arm cores. (E.g. the Samsung ones). So there is potential for investment.
- 2bitencryption 4y agoSomeone fill me in - are all my understandings here correct? 1. ARM is a RISC architecture, but it is proprietary/licensed, subject to export law, etc. 2. ARM is having a heyday, powering just about every mobile device, plus Apple's recent M1/M2 chips, and is also becoming more common on supercomputers and on servers 3. RISC-V is also a RISC, as the name implies, but is owned by a non-profit and intends to be open and easy to license So next I would ask, do recent developments that make ARM so promising also make RISC-V promising? Do the decades of work that it took to make ARM the rising star also apply to RISC-V? How far away is RISC-V from being competitive with ARM at a technical level? Or is it already there? Bonus question... given that both ARM and RISC-V have similar goals, how feasible is an abstract layer on top of them? Meaning, five years from now, how possible is it that I have a RISC-V phone that can run ARM binaries, and and ARM phone that could run RISC-V binaries?
- snvzz 4y ago>How far away is RISC-V from being competitive with ARM at a technical level? Or is it already there? RISC-V caught up, key functionality wise, with the set of extensions ratified in December 2021. There's key advantages to RISC-V, licensing aside. It leverages industry experience and avoids many pitfalls thanks to not dragging any baggage. Field experts such as Jim Keller sing praises about it.
- philliphaydon 4y agoSo I don’t understand any of this stuff. But does this mean applications built for ARM64. Like a .NET 7 app which targets linux-arm64 and runs on… say Ubuntu ARM. Will run on a RISC-V cpu?
- snvzz 4y ago>dotnet Is the single remaining major runtime that's still not ported to RISC-V. Therefore, the answer is: Not yet.
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- mepian 4y agoIt's exciting that Google specifically requires memory tagging support and the J extension (Standard Extension for Dynamically Translated Languages) from RISC-V processors that are going to run Android: https://youtu.be/70O_RmTWP58?t=651 https://youtu.be/70O_RmTWP58?t=651
- snvzz 4y agoDefining the requirements is one point, one task in that list. Developing J is another. Note that J is not a ratified extension, or even close to being so. It has been moving slowly for years (been a low priority), and now it is finally getting some attention, as higher priority items (such as H, B, V and Zc) are either done or final stages.
- viraptor 4y agoCould Google pull another QUIC here? "Here's a thing we implemented and deployed, wanna polish it up and call http2?" (Yes, I'm ignoring nuance here)
- pjmlp 4y agoThere is also "Member Day Session: J Extension Group Meeting" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEzXsA--9Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEzXsA--9Y
- johnea 4y agoARM is on the way out... Also, watch for Si implanted back doors. Guaranteed to happen... One big impediment to RISC-V now is GPU, but that is also coming on fast: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/risc-v-universe-grows-with-new-gpus-cpus-and-development-kits/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/risc-v-universe-grows-...
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- azinman2 4y ago> The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. That’s really the motivation here. I guess google is trying to stay ahead of being replaced in China? To me, as a westerner, I‘d rather see ARM succeed than RISC-V. Despite ironically being designed in the west, rallying the world around an open instruction set I believe will primarily benefit China, who wants to lead in semiconductors. It gives them the ability to become big players without having to push a new ISA on the world, and if it becomes dominant on mobile, they could see themselves replacing Qualcomm, Intel etc. It is a zero sum game all around.
- snvzz 4y agoIf the west does not adopt RISC-V, then it will simply fall behind China. I don't think this is something we want.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoThat assumes that RISC-V is a competitive advantage over ARM and x86. While I have no particular grounds for pessimism about RISC-V, it seems a bit premature to assume that it's better in practice than those others.
- photonbeam 4y agoriscv does have something that arm/x86 doesn't have: intense implementation competition at every perf/price point Lots of companies are throwing their hat in trying to design a riscv core. You can do a riscv startup, its much harder to do an arm startup and near impossible to do an x86 one
- stonogo 4y agoI've been hearing about how RISC-V is going to crush the market for over a decade, and the only fully-functional RISC-V-based product on the market is a soldering iron. Everything else is some kind of DIY proof of concept kit of no use to any actual consumer or business. The architecture has about fifteen or twenty years before they are any kind of meaningful threat to x86_64, assuming it lasts that long.
- garganzol 4y agoCommoditize your complement [0], right? [0] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
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- jbirer 4y agoGod I love Google.
- mozball 4y agoWould moving to RISC-V have any effect on Android's fragmentation and update problem (due to Qualcomm's stranglehold on the android ARM market)?
- bayindirh 4y agoI don't think so. Moving to Fuchsia and producing SoCs with some closed parts will allow any vendor to obsolete any part without any problems. Stopping to provide drivers will make any IC as dead as a well cooked brick. I think Fuchsia's main aim is to provide Google more control on the Android stack. "We will be able to do things more securely than Linux" reads like "We'll be able to close down devices even more while giving you a sense of openness" to me. So, Google might be using RISC-V as another way to distance the platform from contemporary hardware/software ecosystem and make it practically harder to tinker/root/exploit beyond their (financial) comfort zone.
- snvzz 4y ago>Stopping to provide drivers will make any IC as dead as a well cooked brick. AIUI Fuchsia got stable driver APIs/ABIs, so the Linux rules do not apply.
- bayindirh 4y agoYou can always forget a version check in your production code which fails to load your driver if the kernel version is beyond a certain point. A stable API/ABI cannot stop a determined company from deprecating your hardware.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThe Android software update problem is a tragedy that will not end with the introduction of RISC-V. Hell, it could get worse.
- kernal 4y agoThe top Android OEM's now offer 3/4 OS updates and 5 years of security updates. It's time to let go of the "Android software update problem is a tragedy" criticism. And if you still want to use your Android phone after 5 years there's a good chance that there will be a LineageOS build for it.
- mastax 4y ago> The world's biggest companies are building trillion-dollar businesses on top of the Arm architecture, and the realities of product design mean all these plans are two to five years out. So for Arm, giving off a vibe of "instability" is probably the single biggest thing it can do to drive away customers.
- stonogo 4y agoWith a permissively licensed chip running a permissively licensed Fuchsia kernel and the permissively licensed Android runtime atop that, Google can finally explicitly slam the door on people who think they get to contribute to Google projects, which should save a ton of money over the bureaucratic-slow-march approach they take today. Because vendors won't have to release device kernels any more, and will be able to use arbitrary ISA extensions they're under no impulse to distribute, the industry will achieve the ultimate nirvana last enjoyed by AT&T before the breakup -- this hardware is not yours, we will not be releasing technical information about it, and God help you if we catch you opening it up! It's been a long road but I really think we'll see the return of the "no user serviceable parts inside" sticker, only for phone software this time around.
- jacooper 4y agoHoppefully by that time Right to repair laws would be already set. Also this should push anyone over the edge about using copyleft licenses, if you are complaining about unusable android without google services now, having no Roms all together is even worse.
- phh 4y agoGoogle "wants" that, but doesn't seem to push forward on that matter. AOSP gerrit received risc-v jvm CLs 2 years ago from external contributors, and didn't merge any. (sorry, I have no source from Google's gerrit since they regularly clean it up, but you can find https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/21/android_riscv_port/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/21/android_riscv_port/ for related info ) Current state of Android RISC-V support 2 years after those ignored contribution is literally "we have a working libc", which isn't great. My understanding of Google's presentation is that Android 14 (Q3 2023) will have interpreter-only jvm support for RISC-V, no JIT/AOT. (I'm surprised there is no pure C interpreter that would work anywhere, but well). So decent RISC-V support in Android may happen for Android 15, so Q3 2024. Will there be weird ABI/ISA issues that will need few versions to iron out? Hard to say, armv5 didn't go smoothly, nor armv7 (hi neon-less nvidia), and risc-v's modularity might prove to be challenging on that regard. Overall, even though Google/Android doesn't seem as pushy on risc-v as they pretend to be, I'd say Google/Android will indeed be ready when the risc-v industry is ready for prime time.
- Conan_Kudo 4y agoNobody really wanted to integrate RISC-V support anywhere while the ISA and ABI was unstable. That only really got finalized last year, so I am not surprised that it took this long.
- packetlost 4y agoThis actually seems like the most reasonable reason to me. It wasn't stable, there was nobody (planning) on making RISC-V devices on which you'd want to run Android, and compiler support was far behind. We're in a very different place now, I would have made that same call (though perhaps would have given more reasoning to reduce speculation).
- fulafel 4y agoIs this more about the ABI? I couldn't find incompatible userspace ISA changes since many years (things sounded to have settled down since a while even in 2016: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/riscv-spec-v2.1.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/riscv-spec-v2.1...). The RISC-V Linux port was also merged to mainline in 2017 and presumably been living under the stern binary & ABI compatibility rules there.
- college_physics 4y agoRISC-V is mentioned (once) in RFC-0111 (Initial Fuchsia hardware platform specifications) https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/rfcs/0111_fuchsia_hardware_specifications https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/rfcs/0...
- Nomentatus 4y agoSeemingly only yesterday, there was a lively rather abstract debate here on HN over the reasons why open hardware wasn't a thing. Many said it wouldn't ever exist and had good arguments for that. (Which arguments irritated me.) Irritation gone.