4 ms·

The POWER ISA wasn't royalty free until 2019, over a decade after its decline. RISC-V was royalty free from the beginning.

deleted 4y ago
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brucethemoose2 4y ago
But thats still 4 years of basically zero POWER adoption. I don't want to hate on RISC-V, but I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now, even with ARM's shenanigans.
- sauruk 4y ago
  I get the impression that devs are happy about RISCV and willing to port things to it, not so much for POWER. Also China seems to be pursuing RISCV heavily.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    But where the rubber hits the road seems to be in niche stuff like accelerators (which is indeed a great application for RISC-V) and low power embedded stuff. Other countries (like Russia, and China's MIPs thing) have pursued novel architectures for higher power general purpose computing, but its mostly for government use I think. China pulling off a societal transition to RISC-V would be quite a coup.
  - an-unknown 4y ago
    To be fair, a lot of software already supports POWER right now, including the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, the OpenJDK, various database engines, and so on. Don't forget that a lot of embedded devices used PowerPC in the past and it was easy to get PowerPC based hardware like e.g. old Mac computers or game consoles. Today you can get large POWER based servers which compete with big multisocket x86 servers. I think the main problem of POWER today is that you can't get a "Raspi sized" development board, while you can easily get all kinds of ARM based SBCs as well as various RISC-V based SBCs. The smallest POWER system you can get right now is iirc a workstation from Raptor which essentially competes with Xeon workstations, if you don't want to play around with soft cores on FPGAs.
- xxpor 4y ago
  Four years is nothing in HW timescales.
- abeyer 4y ago
  Is there any actual POWER core ip out there that people can build on or experiment with? Yes, the ISA itself is open, but last I looked that was it. I think RV's availability of implemented cores (even if they aren't the most cutting edge or high performance) is helping it build some momentum. Whether that's actually "ARM-killer" momentum remains to be seen, and might well not be... but I don't think I'll write them off quite yet, just based on IBM's long history of failures to position and market POWER well.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Microwatt is the only one I know of. Built as a tiny fgpa core. https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
  - an-unknown 4y ago
    Yes, there are open core IPs for POWER: - https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2i https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2i - https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2o https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2o - https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
    - abeyer 4y ago
      ah, interesting, will need to check those out
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now I don't understand why. RISC-V is being used and pushed by 1000s of companies at this point. You can license cores from 100+ vendors or you can make your own. There are lots of companies pushing it into every single part of the market. There are well kown cores for space travel, the next generation is RISC-V. RISC-V is already in plenty of low level cores, in things like SSDs, NICs and so on. Companies like Andes push it into billions of consumer devices. In terms of the ISA itself it is already a match or better then ARM in most ways. And in 1-2 years with the next rounds of specs, it will be more advanced. To me it seems like RISC-V is already winning by far and its just a question of time. This is more like Linux in the late 90s vs commercial Unix.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brucethemoose2 4y ago

But thats still 4 years of basically zero POWER adoption. I don't want to hate on RISC-V, but I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now, even with ARM's shenanigans.

sauruk 4y ago
I get the impression that devs are happy about RISCV and willing to port things to it, not so much for POWER. Also China seems to be pursuing RISCV heavily.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  But where the rubber hits the road seems to be in niche stuff like accelerators (which is indeed a great application for RISC-V) and low power embedded stuff. Other countries (like Russia, and China's MIPs thing) have pursued novel architectures for higher power general purpose computing, but its mostly for government use I think. China pulling off a societal transition to RISC-V would be quite a coup.
- an-unknown 4y ago
  To be fair, a lot of software already supports POWER right now, including the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, the OpenJDK, various database engines, and so on. Don't forget that a lot of embedded devices used PowerPC in the past and it was easy to get PowerPC based hardware like e.g. old Mac computers or game consoles. Today you can get large POWER based servers which compete with big multisocket x86 servers. I think the main problem of POWER today is that you can't get a "Raspi sized" development board, while you can easily get all kinds of ARM based SBCs as well as various RISC-V based SBCs. The smallest POWER system you can get right now is iirc a workstation from Raptor which essentially competes with Xeon workstations, if you don't want to play around with soft cores on FPGAs.
xxpor 4y ago
Four years is nothing in HW timescales.
abeyer 4y ago
Is there any actual POWER core ip out there that people can build on or experiment with? Yes, the ISA itself is open, but last I looked that was it. I think RV's availability of implemented cores (even if they aren't the most cutting edge or high performance) is helping it build some momentum. Whether that's actually "ARM-killer" momentum remains to be seen, and might well not be... but I don't think I'll write them off quite yet, just based on IBM's long history of failures to position and market POWER well.
- rektide 4y ago
  Microwatt is the only one I know of. Built as a tiny fgpa core. https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
- an-unknown 4y ago
  Yes, there are open core IPs for POWER: - https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2i https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2i - https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2o https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2o - https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
  - abeyer 4y ago
    ah, interesting, will need to check those out
panick21_ 4y ago
> I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now I don't understand why. RISC-V is being used and pushed by 1000s of companies at this point. You can license cores from 100+ vendors or you can make your own. There are lots of companies pushing it into every single part of the market. There are well kown cores for space travel, the next generation is RISC-V. RISC-V is already in plenty of low level cores, in things like SSDs, NICs and so on. Companies like Andes push it into billions of consumer devices. In terms of the ISA itself it is already a match or better then ARM in most ways. And in 1-2 years with the next rounds of specs, it will be more advanced. To me it seems like RISC-V is already winning by far and its just a question of time. This is more like Linux in the late 90s vs commercial Unix.