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Fantastic… 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

Fantastic… 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 ago
Read 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 ago
  Meanwhile, 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 ago
    The 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.
bee_rider 4y ago
Is there a bootstrapping issue here that Google can solve? It seems to me that the market for fast RISC-V processors is pretty small until there’s a consumer-friendly OS to run on the things, and of course only hobbyists will port their OS to a slow chip. The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.
- snvzz 4y ago
  Linux support is quite solid already, and Debian (largest Linux distribution) builds over 95% of packages for this architecture. The only major runtime missing is dotnet. This is about Android, which is very different from your average Linux system.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I quite like Linux, but it doesn’t appear to be super popular among consumers. (This is not intended as a slight — IMO open source works best as a community project by developers, trying to spread it to people who aren’t able to contribute doesn’t really help either party that much).
    - snvzz 4y ago
      If that's your concern, Android (the story's topic) is very much popular among consumers. Windows, MacOS and IOS also are, but the community cannot port these. There are less popular / niche, community-run OS projects like Haiku which already run on RISC-V.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        Yep! This is why, despite not being an Android user, I’m (speculatively) happy to see Google kind of kick-starting the software ecosystem. Hopefully that’ll lead to higher performance hardware, and it’ll eventually hit the point where we want to run proper desktop Linux on it. Still some potential pitfalls, hopefully we won’t get super locked down hardware (I’m under the impression that that’s a bit of a problem in the phone universe).
zzz345345 4y ago
RaspberryPi designs are not completely open and RISC-V is, right?
- laweijfmvo 4y ago
  RISC-V is an open ISA. It doesn't mean you can't build a closed system on RISC-V, nor does it guarantee anything about the firmwares and auxiliary chips (wifi etc).
- snvzz 4y ago
  RISC-V is an ISA or Instruction Set Architecture. This defines the interface between hardware and software. If software and hardware both follow the specification, then the software will run on the hardware, and the hardware will run the software. Both the hardware and the software could be entirely proprietary and extremely locked up, while compliant, as that'd fall well outside the ISA's scope.
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  It's neither. The broadcom SOC closed source, and it doesn't have public documentation. Also it has a videocore core running a proprietary RTOS called microsoft ThreadX that does bootstrapping and some low level hardware stuff.
  - intsunny 4y ago
    Holy moly. Never knew that Microsoft developed and owned ThreadX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX#Products_using_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX#Products_using_it
snvzz 4y ago
>RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips Current chips in cheap SBCs are already equal or above Raspberry Pi 4 level[0]. Particularly so when most Raspberry Pi 4 do not have a sufficient cooling solution and will be quickly throttled under load. The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1]. 0. https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlPLnBuZw== https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlP... 1. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-risc-v-chip-to-hpc/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-ri...
- Sakos 4y ago
  > The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1]. I'm gonna need to see benchmarks before I believe that.
monocasa 4y ago
VisonFive 2 is a decent amount faster than a RPi4. And there was a floodgate opened for high perf core announcements at the recent RISC-V summit. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-next https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-n... Most of those are probably bullshiting some major aspect of their cores' perf but there's designs like from from Jim Keller's Tenstorrent too. Jim Keller is sort of known for not bullshitting.
- hajile 4y ago
  There's a big difference here. A lot of very good designers saw a way to cash in on the emerging RISC-V market. Chip designers saw the potential and joined stealth startups where they could go from $400k per year to many millions. This potential payout poached a LOT of the best designers from big-name design companies. I think there's a lot of potential here and probably a bit less over-promising than you'd get from companies without such experienced design talent.
- brucehoult 4y ago
  It's not, it's a bit slower. But anyway it's close enough that unless you put two side by side or use a stopwatch you probably wouldn't notice the difference.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    But it's a qualified not. Specifically, I know two ways: 0. VisionFive 2's SoC has drastically faster GPU and overall better peripherals 1. Raspberry Pi 4 will overheat and heavily throttle at the slightest hint of load. With this in mind, VisionFive 2's CPU will in most situations be faster, by virtue of not throttling. *. Most heatsinks only mitigate this situation partially. You'd need either active cooling, or to get a 400 instead, which whole keyboards very effectively acts as heatsink.
brucehoult 4y ago
>RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly. RISC-V is not quite Pi 4 level on the fastest SBC you can buy today, the VisionFive 2, where some kickstarter backers have already received their boards. It's around 80% as fast as Pi 4. Sipeed have announced their LM4A with TH1520 SoC will be on sale late Q1. They've published benchmarks running at 1.85 GHz showing it is faster than Pi 4 at that speed, but it is supposed to run at 2.5 GHz with a heatsink. SiFive have announced that their HiFive Pro board will be shipping in the summer, using Intel's "Horse Creek" SoC (which in turn uses SiFive P550 cores). The SoC was demonstrated running by Intel back in September. SiFive says the board will run at 2.2 GHz. It's should be similar performance as an RK3588 at similar clock speed i.e. quite a lot faster than a Pi 4. Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. They're further away -- 2024 or 2025 -- but there is basically no doubt that they will come. Android software probably isn't going to be ready for prime time until 2024 or 2025 anyway.
- Vogtinator 4y ago
  > Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. Which companies?

Fantastic… 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 ago

Read 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 ago
Meanwhile, 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 ago
  The 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.

bee_rider 4y ago

Is there a bootstrapping issue here that Google can solve? It seems to me that the market for fast RISC-V processors is pretty small until there’s a consumer-friendly OS to run on the things, and of course only hobbyists will port their OS to a slow chip. The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.

snvzz 4y ago
Linux support is quite solid already, and Debian (largest Linux distribution) builds over 95% of packages for this architecture. The only major runtime missing is dotnet. This is about Android, which is very different from your average Linux system.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I quite like Linux, but it doesn’t appear to be super popular among consumers. (This is not intended as a slight — IMO open source works best as a community project by developers, trying to spread it to people who aren’t able to contribute doesn’t really help either party that much).
  - snvzz 4y ago
    If that's your concern, Android (the story's topic) is very much popular among consumers. Windows, MacOS and IOS also are, but the community cannot port these. There are less popular / niche, community-run OS projects like Haiku which already run on RISC-V.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Yep! This is why, despite not being an Android user, I’m (speculatively) happy to see Google kind of kick-starting the software ecosystem. Hopefully that’ll lead to higher performance hardware, and it’ll eventually hit the point where we want to run proper desktop Linux on it. Still some potential pitfalls, hopefully we won’t get super locked down hardware (I’m under the impression that that’s a bit of a problem in the phone universe).

zzz345345 4y ago

RaspberryPi designs are not completely open and RISC-V is, right?

laweijfmvo 4y ago
RISC-V is an open ISA. It doesn't mean you can't build a closed system on RISC-V, nor does it guarantee anything about the firmwares and auxiliary chips (wifi etc).
snvzz 4y ago
RISC-V is an ISA or Instruction Set Architecture. This defines the interface between hardware and software. If software and hardware both follow the specification, then the software will run on the hardware, and the hardware will run the software. Both the hardware and the software could be entirely proprietary and extremely locked up, while compliant, as that'd fall well outside the ISA's scope.
RobotToaster 4y ago
It's neither. The broadcom SOC closed source, and it doesn't have public documentation. Also it has a videocore core running a proprietary RTOS called microsoft ThreadX that does bootstrapping and some low level hardware stuff.
- intsunny 4y ago
  Holy moly. Never knew that Microsoft developed and owned ThreadX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX#Products_using_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX#Products_using_it

snvzz 4y ago

>RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips Current chips in cheap SBCs are already equal or above Raspberry Pi 4 level[0]. Particularly so when most Raspberry Pi 4 do not have a sufficient cooling solution and will be quickly throttled under load. The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1]. 0. https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlPLnBuZw== https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlP... 1. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-risc-v-chip-to-hpc/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-ri...

Sakos 4y ago
> The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1]. I'm gonna need to see benchmarks before I believe that.

monocasa 4y ago

VisonFive 2 is a decent amount faster than a RPi4. And there was a floodgate opened for high perf core announcements at the recent RISC-V summit. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-next https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-n... Most of those are probably bullshiting some major aspect of their cores' perf but there's designs like from from Jim Keller's Tenstorrent too. Jim Keller is sort of known for not bullshitting.

hajile 4y ago
There's a big difference here. A lot of very good designers saw a way to cash in on the emerging RISC-V market. Chip designers saw the potential and joined stealth startups where they could go from $400k per year to many millions. This potential payout poached a LOT of the best designers from big-name design companies. I think there's a lot of potential here and probably a bit less over-promising than you'd get from companies without such experienced design talent.
brucehoult 4y ago
It's not, it's a bit slower. But anyway it's close enough that unless you put two side by side or use a stopwatch you probably wouldn't notice the difference.
- snvzz 4y ago
  But it's a qualified not. Specifically, I know two ways: 0. VisionFive 2's SoC has drastically faster GPU and overall better peripherals 1. Raspberry Pi 4 will overheat and heavily throttle at the slightest hint of load. With this in mind, VisionFive 2's CPU will in most situations be faster, by virtue of not throttling. *. Most heatsinks only mitigate this situation partially. You'd need either active cooling, or to get a 400 instead, which whole keyboards very effectively acts as heatsink.

brucehoult 4y ago

>RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly. RISC-V is not quite Pi 4 level on the fastest SBC you can buy today, the VisionFive 2, where some kickstarter backers have already received their boards. It's around 80% as fast as Pi 4. Sipeed have announced their LM4A with TH1520 SoC will be on sale late Q1. They've published benchmarks running at 1.85 GHz showing it is faster than Pi 4 at that speed, but it is supposed to run at 2.5 GHz with a heatsink. SiFive have announced that their HiFive Pro board will be shipping in the summer, using Intel's "Horse Creek" SoC (which in turn uses SiFive P550 cores). The SoC was demonstrated running by Intel back in September. SiFive says the board will run at 2.2 GHz. It's should be similar performance as an RK3588 at similar clock speed i.e. quite a lot faster than a Pi 4. Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. They're further away -- 2024 or 2025 -- but there is basically no doubt that they will come. Android software probably isn't going to be ready for prime time until 2024 or 2025 anyway.

Vogtinator 4y ago
> Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. Which companies?