6 ms·

Sounds like ARM is afraid of RISC-V...

by photochemsyn 3y ago

neolefty 3y ago
Or trying to catch up to Apple?
- snvzz 3y ago
  Wei-han Lien (lead architect of M1 at Apple) is the lead architect of Ascalon at Tenstorrent (CEO: Jim Keller). Ascalon is a RISC-V microarchitecture expected to be released in 2024, with similar performance to projected AMD Zen5 (also 2024), but lower power consumption. If ARM is still trying to catch up to Apple, they'll be leapfrogged by RISC-V, as early as that.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    This is pure speculation. ARM has very successful architectures and cores already in the market. The current iteration of the Snapdragon 8cx does a pretty good job in general purpose computing scenarios [0]. There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Vendors can and will promise breakthroughs every now and then, that is just how marketing works. It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now. [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600_12937_14521.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600...
    - snvzz 3y ago
      >There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Depends on what "it" is. For the whole Cortex-M line and A53/A55, SiFive has had designs with better power-performance-area for years now. For the higher performance A70 line, SiFive has better designs competing up to A76. There's several other vendors, with their own competitive RISC-V cores. >This is pure speculation. Not when it's based in announcements and talks by the relevant companies. >It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now Wait, why do you think Tenstorrent will not deliver? Do you actually have anything? I have no reason to believe that strong teams that have successfully delivered competitive microarchitectures in a range of companies won't do it with RISC-V now that they're with Tenstorrent, MIPS, Rivos, Ventana, Qualcomm or any others. Ventana's Veyron and Tenstorrent Ascalon are imminent. The other companies are less public about what they're doing. Any one of these efforts could be delayed or underdeliver. All of them? That seems highly unlikely. RISC-V is inevitable.
      - manuelabeledo 3y ago
        What is a “better” design? How do you quantify that? Are RISC-V “better designed” than x86 processors, even when the latter are overwhelmingly more popular and faster than the former? > Not when it's based in announcements and talks by the relevant companies. Again, this is exactly what marketing is. I cannot begin to count how many companies formed by wildly successful leaders of the industry, have failed to deliver. > Any one of these efforts could be delayed or underdeliver. All of them? That seems highly unlikely. Core design and implementation takes years to complete. The supposition is that a handful of relatively new companies will take the processor market by storm in a year or two, with less than a decade of work behind them, and a tenth of the budget, compared to companies like AMD or Intel. That is speculation if I ever seen any.
        snvzz 3y ago
        >What is a “better” design? How do you quantify that? I mentioned it: power-performance-area. In the case of SiFive, they seem to like comparing each of their designs with a specific one from ARM. They typically manage to perform better, use less area and consume less power, at the same time, relative to the ARM design they picked. >Core design and implementation takes years to complete. These years already happened, these are several years underway. What follows is the products that we are about to see. >and a tenth of the budget There's several billions already invested. Source: RISC-V Foundation's main talks at RISC-V Summit last December. In 2021, the theme was acceleration. In 2022, it was momentum, because it is already there. RISC-V is huge. RISC-V is inevitable. >The supposition is that a handful of relatively new companies will take the processor market by storm in a year or two, with less than a decade of work behind them, and a tenth of the budget, compared to companies like AMD or Intel. Exciting times to live in. I expect AMD and Intel to survive, and find a way to thrive. They can e.g. provide RISC-V CPUs with excellent x86 acceleration, making them an easy choice in markets that depend on x86 software still. I do not have faith ARM will be able to adapt, due to their management's recent behavior. They are dinosaurs. Won't know what hit them.
        manuelabeledo 3y ago
0xr0kk3r 3y ago
Or maybe just doing what every CPU company does: keep improving? I mean there are many good reasons why RISC-V still hasn't busted out yet. It's just an ISA, that's it. The implementations are wildly different, which is not something devs what to deal with. Risc-v didn't even have a rev 1 debug spec until a few months ago i mean come on get it together (what about the embedded -march that has been in limbo for 5 years). They're catching up with arm, slowly, but arm has an entire ecosystem that people trust that risc-v don't have.
mdasen 3y ago
It's probably not RISC-V or Apple that worries ARM. It's probably Qualcomm. Qualcomm has been licensing ARM's core designs since the beginning of the smartphone era. Qualcomm bought Nuvia so that they could design their own cores and pay much lower royalties just for the instruction set. ARM has a lawsuit against Qualcomm/Nuvia because Nuvia's agreement with ARM was (allegedly) that they wouldn't sell their IP to anyone without ARM's approval. However, churning out cores that are better than what Qualcomm/Nuvia can produce would make non-Qualcomm processors faster or keep the money coming from Qualcomm. ARM doesn't need to catch up with Apple. Apple hasn't been buying ARM's designs for many years and there's no chance that will change. Even if Apple is faster, the whole Android world needs ARM's designs and most customers aren't choosing iPhones because Apple has faster processors. Apple's no threat to ARM in the data center since Apple isn't interested in the market. ARM probably isn't that afraid of RISC-V at this point. Yes, there are some companies doing good things with RISC-V, but you don't have to look far to see how hard it is to create a great processor. Qualcomm has way more resources than RISC-V startups and they bought Nuvia (with engineers who made Apple Silicon) and they still aren't pushing their own cores. When you look at software benchmarks on ARM, there's often some lag (compared to x64) due to less mature compiler optimization and that's going to be even worse for RISC-V. While a lot of software is portable, it's not a drop-in replacement. A lot of Linux distros aren't even supporting ARM that well at the moment. None of this is meant to belittle RISC-V. It's simply meant to note that there's a big hill to climb and it takes a long time to climb that hill. Even Apple who control their whole ecosystem took a very long time. Apple started shipping their own designs in 2010 and it was a decade before they made their way into MacBooks. Apple has the kind of money and ecosystem control that make such a move easier. That's not to say that RISC-V can't make a big impact, but rather to note that the threat from RISC-V is probably significantly farther out. There are always threats, but the big threat right now is Qualcomm (and others) moving away from ARM's designs. If they're able to just pay instruction set licenses instead of the core licenses, it'll dry up ARM's revenue. As ARM's revenue dries up, they won't have the money to invest in new core designs. That will accelerate the decline of ARM's revenue as it becomes easier to beat their core designs.
manuelabeledo 3y ago
Isn’t RISC-V still trying to catch up to A55, which is a 10 year old architecture?
- speed_spread 3y ago
  IMO The first market RISC-V will be competitive in is microcontrollers. Cortex-M is very popular but it wouldn't take that much for it to start being replaced by home-growned Chinese MCUs.
- snvzz 3y ago
  SiFive U74 > A55. Smaller, less power, faster. It has also been available for a while (years). Today, it is found in the cheap VisionFive 2, Star64 and Milk-V SBCs.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    The only comparison between these two I could find [0] gives an advantage to the U74 in a synthetic benchmark, but also clarifies that it does not have vector instruction support. It is nice to see competition to ARM in the embedded market, but it is still far behind. [0] https://www.elektroniknet.de/international/from-microcontroller-to-multicore-processor.191302/seite-3.html https://www.elektroniknet.de/international/from-microcontrol...
    - snvzz 3y ago
      For U74 with vector support, look at X280 instead. It's pretty much the U74 microarchitecture with an added vector unit. Google is one of the X280 licensees, already using the resulting chips, where they paired the X280 with a specialized accelerator, using a very tight interface between accelerator and cpu, co-designed with SiFive. P670 and P470 are newer, vector-enabled higher performance designs.
      - manuelabeledo 3y ago
        So higher power draw? This all reads like moving goalposts to me.

Sounds like ARM is afraid of RISC-V...

neolefty 3y ago

Or trying to catch up to Apple?

snvzz 3y ago
Wei-han Lien (lead architect of M1 at Apple) is the lead architect of Ascalon at Tenstorrent (CEO: Jim Keller). Ascalon is a RISC-V microarchitecture expected to be released in 2024, with similar performance to projected AMD Zen5 (also 2024), but lower power consumption. If ARM is still trying to catch up to Apple, they'll be leapfrogged by RISC-V, as early as that.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  This is pure speculation. ARM has very successful architectures and cores already in the market. The current iteration of the Snapdragon 8cx does a pretty good job in general purpose computing scenarios [0]. There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Vendors can and will promise breakthroughs every now and then, that is just how marketing works. It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now. [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600_12937_14521.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/SD-8cx-Gen-3-vs-M1-vs-M2_14600...
  - snvzz 3y ago
    >There are no RISC-V cores in the market to compete with it. Depends on what "it" is. For the whole Cortex-M line and A53/A55, SiFive has had designs with better power-performance-area for years now. For the higher performance A70 line, SiFive has better designs competing up to A76. There's several other vendors, with their own competitive RISC-V cores. >This is pure speculation. Not when it's based in announcements and talks by the relevant companies. >It happened before with things like Graviton, and of course Tenstorrent is doing it now Wait, why do you think Tenstorrent will not deliver? Do you actually have anything? I have no reason to believe that strong teams that have successfully delivered competitive microarchitectures in a range of companies won't do it with RISC-V now that they're with Tenstorrent, MIPS, Rivos, Ventana, Qualcomm or any others. Ventana's Veyron and Tenstorrent Ascalon are imminent. The other companies are less public about what they're doing. Any one of these efforts could be delayed or underdeliver. All of them? That seems highly unlikely. RISC-V is inevitable.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      What is a “better” design? How do you quantify that? Are RISC-V “better designed” than x86 processors, even when the latter are overwhelmingly more popular and faster than the former? > Not when it's based in announcements and talks by the relevant companies. Again, this is exactly what marketing is. I cannot begin to count how many companies formed by wildly successful leaders of the industry, have failed to deliver. > Any one of these efforts could be delayed or underdeliver. All of them? That seems highly unlikely. Core design and implementation takes years to complete. The supposition is that a handful of relatively new companies will take the processor market by storm in a year or two, with less than a decade of work behind them, and a tenth of the budget, compared to companies like AMD or Intel. That is speculation if I ever seen any.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        >What is a “better” design? How do you quantify that? I mentioned it: power-performance-area. In the case of SiFive, they seem to like comparing each of their designs with a specific one from ARM. They typically manage to perform better, use less area and consume less power, at the same time, relative to the ARM design they picked. >Core design and implementation takes years to complete. These years already happened, these are several years underway. What follows is the products that we are about to see. >and a tenth of the budget There's several billions already invested. Source: RISC-V Foundation's main talks at RISC-V Summit last December. In 2021, the theme was acceleration. In 2022, it was momentum, because it is already there. RISC-V is huge. RISC-V is inevitable. >The supposition is that a handful of relatively new companies will take the processor market by storm in a year or two, with less than a decade of work behind them, and a tenth of the budget, compared to companies like AMD or Intel. Exciting times to live in. I expect AMD and Intel to survive, and find a way to thrive. They can e.g. provide RISC-V CPUs with excellent x86 acceleration, making them an easy choice in markets that depend on x86 software still. I do not have faith ARM will be able to adapt, due to their management's recent behavior. They are dinosaurs. Won't know what hit them.
        manuelabeledo 3y ago

0xr0kk3r 3y ago

Or maybe just doing what every CPU company does: keep improving? I mean there are many good reasons why RISC-V still hasn't busted out yet. It's just an ISA, that's it. The implementations are wildly different, which is not something devs what to deal with. Risc-v didn't even have a rev 1 debug spec until a few months ago i mean come on get it together (what about the embedded -march that has been in limbo for 5 years). They're catching up with arm, slowly, but arm has an entire ecosystem that people trust that risc-v don't have.

mdasen 3y ago

It's probably not RISC-V or Apple that worries ARM. It's probably Qualcomm. Qualcomm has been licensing ARM's core designs since the beginning of the smartphone era. Qualcomm bought Nuvia so that they could design their own cores and pay much lower royalties just for the instruction set. ARM has a lawsuit against Qualcomm/Nuvia because Nuvia's agreement with ARM was (allegedly) that they wouldn't sell their IP to anyone without ARM's approval. However, churning out cores that are better than what Qualcomm/Nuvia can produce would make non-Qualcomm processors faster or keep the money coming from Qualcomm. ARM doesn't need to catch up with Apple. Apple hasn't been buying ARM's designs for many years and there's no chance that will change. Even if Apple is faster, the whole Android world needs ARM's designs and most customers aren't choosing iPhones because Apple has faster processors. Apple's no threat to ARM in the data center since Apple isn't interested in the market. ARM probably isn't that afraid of RISC-V at this point. Yes, there are some companies doing good things with RISC-V, but you don't have to look far to see how hard it is to create a great processor. Qualcomm has way more resources than RISC-V startups and they bought Nuvia (with engineers who made Apple Silicon) and they still aren't pushing their own cores. When you look at software benchmarks on ARM, there's often some lag (compared to x64) due to less mature compiler optimization and that's going to be even worse for RISC-V. While a lot of software is portable, it's not a drop-in replacement. A lot of Linux distros aren't even supporting ARM that well at the moment. None of this is meant to belittle RISC-V. It's simply meant to note that there's a big hill to climb and it takes a long time to climb that hill. Even Apple who control their whole ecosystem took a very long time. Apple started shipping their own designs in 2010 and it was a decade before they made their way into MacBooks. Apple has the kind of money and ecosystem control that make such a move easier. That's not to say that RISC-V can't make a big impact, but rather to note that the threat from RISC-V is probably significantly farther out. There are always threats, but the big threat right now is Qualcomm (and others) moving away from ARM's designs. If they're able to just pay instruction set licenses instead of the core licenses, it'll dry up ARM's revenue. As ARM's revenue dries up, they won't have the money to invest in new core designs. That will accelerate the decline of ARM's revenue as it becomes easier to beat their core designs.

manuelabeledo 3y ago

Isn’t RISC-V still trying to catch up to A55, which is a 10 year old architecture?

speed_spread 3y ago
IMO The first market RISC-V will be competitive in is microcontrollers. Cortex-M is very popular but it wouldn't take that much for it to start being replaced by home-growned Chinese MCUs.
snvzz 3y ago
SiFive U74 > A55. Smaller, less power, faster. It has also been available for a while (years). Today, it is found in the cheap VisionFive 2, Star64 and Milk-V SBCs.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  The only comparison between these two I could find [0] gives an advantage to the U74 in a synthetic benchmark, but also clarifies that it does not have vector instruction support. It is nice to see competition to ARM in the embedded market, but it is still far behind. [0] https://www.elektroniknet.de/international/from-microcontroller-to-multicore-processor.191302/seite-3.html https://www.elektroniknet.de/international/from-microcontrol...
  - snvzz 3y ago
    For U74 with vector support, look at X280 instead. It's pretty much the U74 microarchitecture with an added vector unit. Google is one of the X280 licensees, already using the resulting chips, where they paired the X280 with a specialized accelerator, using a very tight interface between accelerator and cpu, co-designed with SiFive. P670 and P470 are newer, vector-enabled higher performance designs.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      So higher power draw? This all reads like moving goalposts to me.