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This is such a huge-scale massively-disrupting event. I hope Intel & AMD try to play. I'd love to see ultra-small x86 cores & cut down Gpus come out to play. I

This is such a huge-scale massively-disrupting event. I hope Intel & AMD try to play. I'd love to see ultra-small x86 cores & cut down Gpus come out to play. I tend to doubt x86 is inherently vastly worse. But it's also hard to imagine them wanting to march into a competitive down market where most phones cost less than the starting prices of their regular cpus. This is a huge chance for RISC-V but so far it has been an unserious competitor. Nothing big, nothing efficient, nothing on vaguely recent nodes. And there's just so so much more than cores at stake. Power management, coherency fabric, there's so many other things mobile chips are great at, tuned at. It's just wild that there's literally no one else out there.

klelatti 4y ago
Intel threw billions at trying to get x86 into mobile - and failed. They really don’t have the cash to try that again. AMD has been very successful but wouldn’t have the bandwidth to try this.
xattt 4y ago
> ultra-small x86 cores Is it actually possible to have performant x86 cores for handheld devices, or is that just the limitation of x86 with almost 50 years of legacy?
- margorczynski 4y ago
  Would also like to hear the answer from someone with a better grasp of the subject. I have a crude understanding of how basically a CPU works but the real-deal is probably orders of magnitude more complex and convoluted thanks to optimizations stacked on one another.
  - shash 4y ago
    A statistic from the development of the Shakti platform[1] is that you can fit multiple RISC-V chips within the _decoder_ stage of a modern x86 alone. [1] https://shakti.org.in https://shakti.org.in
brucehoult 4y ago
I don't know what you're even talking about here. Intel's "Horse Creek" RISC-V SoC is build on Intel 4, which is a "vaguely recent node". So recent, it's the first chip made using it. You'll be able to buy a board using those around August or so. Working chips were shown at a conference last September. Ventana's "Veyron 1" RISC-V SoC uses either TSMC 5nm or 3nm. Those are also "vaguely recent". That's an 8-wide 3.6 GHz core, btw, like Apple M1/M2, well ahead of Intel, AMD, or ARM itself. As for "Power management, coherency fabric, there's so many other things mobile chips are great at, tuned at", if you are someone who already has such as chip, such as oh I don't know Qualcomm or Samsung or for that matter Rockchip or Allwinner, and you already have ARM-based chips with all that stuff, and you swap out the ARM cores for RISC-V cores -- then you still have all that non-core stuff.
- rektide 4y ago
  Believe me I'd be happy to be wrong. Thusfar there don't seem to be any generally available chips in the world. No one has benchmarked anything modern. We don't know what to expect yet, there are no known quantities, from what I can tell. I'd forgotten about Horse Creek. It's certainly an interesting future board. I like that it has 10Gbe and some USB3. And PCIe 5.0! That does look modern. Not expecting a high value, a good price, but this could be a good starting place & we should learn! I kind of though Intel had canceled all their RISC-V stuff, but this SiFive board is likely unaffected. However the rest of their once ambitious RISC-V foundry assistance program seems to have been recently killed off, that's why I (accidentally) ruled them out. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinder_discontinued/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinde... I think the vast majority of the chips out there use ARMs CoreLink and Cache Connect Interface. There's a ton of platform, tuning & fabric that I still suspect is missing from most chipmaking orgs, that's going to require intense redevelopment & which will take lots of release iterations to become decent. Ventana is a good mention. They don't seem to be shipping at the moment, don't seem to have anyone posting benchmarks on chips they have. Still to me an unknown quantity, but yeah totally as modern a process as we can expect, very exciting.
  - brucehoult 4y ago
wyldfire 4y ago
> I hope Intel & AMD try to play. Android supports x86_64. Intel and AMD do play in the mobile space. But their smartphone-oriented designs just couldn't cut it. They absolutely wanted to be a part of the largest market of CPUs in the world.

klelatti 4y ago

Intel threw billions at trying to get x86 into mobile - and failed. They really don’t have the cash to try that again. AMD has been very successful but wouldn’t have the bandwidth to try this.

xattt 4y ago

> ultra-small x86 cores Is it actually possible to have performant x86 cores for handheld devices, or is that just the limitation of x86 with almost 50 years of legacy?

margorczynski 4y ago
Would also like to hear the answer from someone with a better grasp of the subject. I have a crude understanding of how basically a CPU works but the real-deal is probably orders of magnitude more complex and convoluted thanks to optimizations stacked on one another.
- shash 4y ago
  A statistic from the development of the Shakti platform[1] is that you can fit multiple RISC-V chips within the _decoder_ stage of a modern x86 alone. [1] https://shakti.org.in https://shakti.org.in

brucehoult 4y ago

I don't know what you're even talking about here. Intel's "Horse Creek" RISC-V SoC is build on Intel 4, which is a "vaguely recent node". So recent, it's the first chip made using it. You'll be able to buy a board using those around August or so. Working chips were shown at a conference last September. Ventana's "Veyron 1" RISC-V SoC uses either TSMC 5nm or 3nm. Those are also "vaguely recent". That's an 8-wide 3.6 GHz core, btw, like Apple M1/M2, well ahead of Intel, AMD, or ARM itself. As for "Power management, coherency fabric, there's so many other things mobile chips are great at, tuned at", if you are someone who already has such as chip, such as oh I don't know Qualcomm or Samsung or for that matter Rockchip or Allwinner, and you already have ARM-based chips with all that stuff, and you swap out the ARM cores for RISC-V cores -- then you still have all that non-core stuff.

rektide 4y ago
Believe me I'd be happy to be wrong. Thusfar there don't seem to be any generally available chips in the world. No one has benchmarked anything modern. We don't know what to expect yet, there are no known quantities, from what I can tell. I'd forgotten about Horse Creek. It's certainly an interesting future board. I like that it has 10Gbe and some USB3. And PCIe 5.0! That does look modern. Not expecting a high value, a good price, but this could be a good starting place & we should learn! I kind of though Intel had canceled all their RISC-V stuff, but this SiFive board is likely unaffected. However the rest of their once ambitious RISC-V foundry assistance program seems to have been recently killed off, that's why I (accidentally) ruled them out. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinder_discontinued/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinde... I think the vast majority of the chips out there use ARMs CoreLink and Cache Connect Interface. There's a ton of platform, tuning & fabric that I still suspect is missing from most chipmaking orgs, that's going to require intense redevelopment & which will take lots of release iterations to become decent. Ventana is a good mention. They don't seem to be shipping at the moment, don't seem to have anyone posting benchmarks on chips they have. Still to me an unknown quantity, but yeah totally as modern a process as we can expect, very exciting.
- brucehoult 4y ago

wyldfire 4y ago

> I hope Intel & AMD try to play. Android supports x86_64. Intel and AMD do play in the mobile space. But their smartphone-oriented designs just couldn't cut it. They absolutely wanted to be a part of the largest market of CPUs in the world.