6 ms·

> “My belief is in the next 5 to 10 years, RISC-V will take over all the data centers,” Keller told EE Times, Isn't this essentially impossible?

jylam 3y ago
Why ?
- klelatti 3y ago
  My interpretation of 'take over' would be a majority of new server installs would be RISC-V based. There is a lead time for development, orders etc plus customers have to be content to switch to a new architecture. Amazon's Arm program started what 6ish years ago and they are at 20% installs (from my recollection).
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    4 1/2 years. November 2018. 20% in 2022, quite possibly 25% by now.
tambourine_man 3y ago
Yes, 5 years seems crazily optimistic to me. But this is Jim Keller and I’m a random internet guy.
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  I find a completely silly claim but I guess as a CEO you need to talk your book. Here is another interview with Jim Keller where he explains why instruction sets doesn't matter that much: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-with-jim-keller-laziest-person-at-tesla https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ladberg 3y ago
    That's not exactly my takeaway, e.g. he says this in that interview which is pretty consistent: > So if I was just going to say if I want to build a computer really fast today, and I want it to go fast, RISC-V is the easiest one to choose. It’s the simplest one, it has got all the right features, it has got the right top eight instructions that you actually need to optimize for, and it doesn't have too much junk.
    - throwaway4good 3y ago
      Yes. Because it has less legacy, it is easier to build for if you are going for on scratch. The point is most code is the same handful of instructions.
- Varloom 3y ago
  This man knows exactly what he is talking about. He was responsible for designing the original AMD Athlon 64. He worked at apple to transition from Generic Samsung ARM SoC to their own Apple silicon which is the base for modern M1 Apple silicon. He worked for Intel (we'll see his work in Lunar Lake, Jim Keller's Royal Core Project). And most importantly he worked again at AMD and gave us Zen architecture.
twoodfin 3y ago
My optimistic take: “All the data centers” are the Cloud hyperscalers, who are increasingly delivering value through PaaS/SaaS vs. raw VMs and IaaS. They’re choosing the CPUs they like best, can turn over quickly if it’s worthwhile, and if the performance/economics of RISC-V are suitably appealing will do so. I wonder how much of, say, S3’s infrastructure is running on Graviton?
- guerby 3y ago
  I hope RISC-V servers will come with open BIOS, given Ron Minnich stance on the proprietary BIOS issue during his time at google I think hyperscalers would like that too. Recently had basic BIOS/BMC bugs it's annoying as hell.
pier25 3y ago
Who knows. There's a huge financial motivation to move to RISC-V to save on energy and heat. Cooling is one of the biggest expenses of a data center.
- blueblob 3y ago
  Is RISC-V any more efficient than arm?
  - pier25 3y ago
    Probably similar but the advantage of RISC-V is that it's open source. AFAIK x86 is still dominating the data centers. There's a bit of ARM going on but wouldn't it make more sense to switch straight to RISC-V?
    - blueblob 3y ago
      Yeah, an open source architecture sounds like it could be a game changer for the SBC market
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
      No, because aarch64 linux distros only became a viable thing just recently. Who knows how many decades it will take for e.g. Debian to support RISC-V properly.
      - blueblob 3y ago
        I didn't downvote you; I think you make a reasonable, albeit exaggerated, point. I think it's also important to look through the lens that a lot of things linux supports are reverse engineered and that's why they take a long time to implement. This is de facto different with everything being open so I expect support will come faster. There's also the fact that this aligns better with the ideologies of a lot of free software enthusiasts so they may be more likely to work on it.
snvzz 3y ago
>Isn't this essentially impossible? RISC-V is inevitable.
imtringued 3y ago
All the Chinese datacenters.
Osiris 3y ago
Considering modern processors spend 4-5 years in development before public release, someone would have to be building the game changing RISC-V CPU right now. Maybe he meant that development on RISC-V CPUs would start in earnest in the next 5-10 years?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- snvzz 3y ago
  >Considering modern processors spend 4-5 years in development before public release, someone would have to be building the game changing RISC-V CPU right now. And they are. Tenstorrent is working on Ascalon. Wei-han Lien (lead architect of M1 at Apple) is the lead architect. 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. Ventana Veyron is due late 2023. A very high performance server chip AIUI implementing RVA22+V. Rivos has been working on something RISC-V, with a very strong team, for several years now. SiFive's next iteration of high performance CPUs is expected to be strong. Alibaba group has something in the works, too. And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. There's way more known projects ongoing, and even more that we do not know of.
- WatchDog 3y ago
  The reason that processors take so long to develop, might have something to do with the complexity of the ISA, most of CPU development effort is spent on verification, if you have a simpler ISA, I would imagine that it makes verification easier.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Furthermore, for RISC-V there's no need to reinvent the wheel re: verification. Multiple companies are offering RISC-V verification services.
syntheweave 3y ago
Data centers are one of the best demographics for adopting new architectures because more of the software can be custom-built towards a narrow application: Get a Linux stack to build, add some network I/O, add some virtualization, and you can do all sorts of things. Client apps have a much harder time making that jump because the environment is more holistic, the hardware more varied, and the need for "must-have" proprietary apps more imperative.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  > Data centers are one of the best demographics […] Hardly. Data centers are a dying breed, and their number has been rapidly dwindling in recent years. DC (and the mythical «on-prem» by extension) has effectively become a dirty word in contemporary times. The most brutal lift-and-shift approach (without discussing the merits of doing so) is most common: create a backup, spin up a cloud «VM», restore from the backup and turn the server in the DC off forever. No-one is going to even remotely consider a new hardware architecture, not even in the cloud. Moreover, since servers do not exist in a vacuum and either run business apps or do something at least remotely useful, that entails the software migration to adopt the new platform. And the adoption has to be force-pushed onto the app developers otherwise they won't bother, and for them to convert/migrate the app onto a new architecture, they need desktops/laptops that run on the new ISA, and no viable server and desktop hardware exists in June 2023 – it will come along later with «later» not having a clear definition. Talking open source is a moot point as most businesses out there run commercially procured business apps.
  - intvocoder 3y ago
    This doesn’t seem to comport with Amazon’s experience, investment, and trajectory with Graviton, based on public reference customers and a few personal anecdotes. Ampere isn’t a slouch either…
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    AWS and Azure are datacenters too. You're paying a x10 markup to make accounting shenanigans easier, but the technology is exactly the same.
cjsplat 3y ago
Cloud services have a lot of back end. Cluster management, file systems, disk / storage systems, network management, database systems. None of those require user or OS instruction set compatibility for legacy apps that are hard or impossible to recompile. And most of these applications don't really require gonzo superscalar performance. Add more cores, support more data streams. If you can eliminate licensing costs for that portion of your fleet, then you only need to expand the ISA compatible portion of your fleet as demanded by paying customers. As an example, suppose all of a cloud provider's services can migrate to RISC-V. As organic demand for x86 Cloud among customers grows, services can shift incrementally to the cheaper home grown platforms. And since the freed up machines are at least partially depreciated, the cost of these servers is much less than what a customer would pay for new servers on prem. (depreciated Cap-ex, far better Op-Ex). The interesting question is the transition rate of end customer apps to the new ISA vs the growth rate of locked ISA apps. Eventually the locked ISA apps portion becomes a lot like the current IBM mainframe business. Very valuable to a very small number of customers. The only counter for this is if x86 can crank performance per $TCO so far that the non-x86 branch can't compete in business terms, which has historically been the issue with ARM.
- als0 3y ago
  > The only counter for this is if x86 can crank performance per $TCO so far that the non-x86 branch can't compete in business terms, which has historically been the issue with ARM. If we take AWS for example, isn't the performance per TCO better of an Arm-based Graviton instance better than x86? I don't think the historical issue you cite represents the future.
  - cjsplat 3y ago
    Impossible to know from the outside. We know what they are selling it for, but that isn't the same. True TCO needs to include the cost to develop the chip - after all, that is folded into the x86 price. If you assume that the Graviton project is $250M per chip design for the 3 iterations, and the online estimates of 1 million chips is accurate, then you need to add about $750 per CPU, beyond the probably $250 per chip fab'ed and packaged. $1000 per chip gets you a lot of x86 horsepower.
doctor_eval 3y ago
I read this and immediately thought of that aphorism, which I heard back in the dialup days when it seemed the internet was never going to take off: Important changes always take much longer than we expect, but have much greater impact than we imagine.
brucehoult 3y ago
The first Graviton machines (which were worse than the current 64 core RISC-V SG2042) were installed in November 2018. Four and a half years later are now up to 20% or 25% of total AWS capacity. Even without any acceleration of adoption, it looks like they could be the majority of AWS within 10 years from first deployment. There seems to be every reason RISC-V could do it faster. Graviton 1 level chips are available right now, Graviton 3 or better coming from multiple companies (including Keller's) in 2024-2025. The software is more critical, but once x86-only things have been made portable to Arm (which can be hard work), further porting them to RISC-V is much much easier.

jylam 3y ago

Why ?

klelatti 3y ago
My interpretation of 'take over' would be a majority of new server installs would be RISC-V based. There is a lead time for development, orders etc plus customers have to be content to switch to a new architecture. Amazon's Arm program started what 6ish years ago and they are at 20% installs (from my recollection).
- brucehoult 3y ago
  4 1/2 years. November 2018. 20% in 2022, quite possibly 25% by now.

tambourine_man 3y ago

Yes, 5 years seems crazily optimistic to me. But this is Jim Keller and I’m a random internet guy.

throwaway4good 3y ago
I find a completely silly claim but I guess as a CEO you need to talk your book. Here is another interview with Jim Keller where he explains why instruction sets doesn't matter that much: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-with-jim-keller-laziest-person-at-tesla https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ladberg 3y ago
  That's not exactly my takeaway, e.g. he says this in that interview which is pretty consistent: > So if I was just going to say if I want to build a computer really fast today, and I want it to go fast, RISC-V is the easiest one to choose. It’s the simplest one, it has got all the right features, it has got the right top eight instructions that you actually need to optimize for, and it doesn't have too much junk.
  - throwaway4good 3y ago
    Yes. Because it has less legacy, it is easier to build for if you are going for on scratch. The point is most code is the same handful of instructions.
Varloom 3y ago
This man knows exactly what he is talking about. He was responsible for designing the original AMD Athlon 64. He worked at apple to transition from Generic Samsung ARM SoC to their own Apple silicon which is the base for modern M1 Apple silicon. He worked for Intel (we'll see his work in Lunar Lake, Jim Keller's Royal Core Project). And most importantly he worked again at AMD and gave us Zen architecture.

twoodfin 3y ago

My optimistic take: “All the data centers” are the Cloud hyperscalers, who are increasingly delivering value through PaaS/SaaS vs. raw VMs and IaaS. They’re choosing the CPUs they like best, can turn over quickly if it’s worthwhile, and if the performance/economics of RISC-V are suitably appealing will do so. I wonder how much of, say, S3’s infrastructure is running on Graviton?

guerby 3y ago
I hope RISC-V servers will come with open BIOS, given Ron Minnich stance on the proprietary BIOS issue during his time at google I think hyperscalers would like that too. Recently had basic BIOS/BMC bugs it's annoying as hell.

pier25 3y ago

Who knows. There's a huge financial motivation to move to RISC-V to save on energy and heat. Cooling is one of the biggest expenses of a data center.

blueblob 3y ago
Is RISC-V any more efficient than arm?
- pier25 3y ago
  Probably similar but the advantage of RISC-V is that it's open source. AFAIK x86 is still dominating the data centers. There's a bit of ARM going on but wouldn't it make more sense to switch straight to RISC-V?
  - blueblob 3y ago
    Yeah, an open source architecture sounds like it could be a game changer for the SBC market
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    No, because aarch64 linux distros only became a viable thing just recently. Who knows how many decades it will take for e.g. Debian to support RISC-V properly.
    - blueblob 3y ago
      I didn't downvote you; I think you make a reasonable, albeit exaggerated, point. I think it's also important to look through the lens that a lot of things linux supports are reverse engineered and that's why they take a long time to implement. This is de facto different with everything being open so I expect support will come faster. There's also the fact that this aligns better with the ideologies of a lot of free software enthusiasts so they may be more likely to work on it.

snvzz 3y ago

>Isn't this essentially impossible? RISC-V is inevitable.

imtringued 3y ago

All the Chinese datacenters.

Osiris 3y ago

Considering modern processors spend 4-5 years in development before public release, someone would have to be building the game changing RISC-V CPU right now. Maybe he meant that development on RISC-V CPUs would start in earnest in the next 5-10 years?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
snvzz 3y ago
>Considering modern processors spend 4-5 years in development before public release, someone would have to be building the game changing RISC-V CPU right now. And they are. Tenstorrent is working on Ascalon. Wei-han Lien (lead architect of M1 at Apple) is the lead architect. 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. Ventana Veyron is due late 2023. A very high performance server chip AIUI implementing RVA22+V. Rivos has been working on something RISC-V, with a very strong team, for several years now. SiFive's next iteration of high performance CPUs is expected to be strong. Alibaba group has something in the works, too. And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. There's way more known projects ongoing, and even more that we do not know of.
WatchDog 3y ago
The reason that processors take so long to develop, might have something to do with the complexity of the ISA, most of CPU development effort is spent on verification, if you have a simpler ISA, I would imagine that it makes verification easier.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Furthermore, for RISC-V there's no need to reinvent the wheel re: verification. Multiple companies are offering RISC-V verification services.

syntheweave 3y ago

Data centers are one of the best demographics for adopting new architectures because more of the software can be custom-built towards a narrow application: Get a Linux stack to build, add some network I/O, add some virtualization, and you can do all sorts of things. Client apps have a much harder time making that jump because the environment is more holistic, the hardware more varied, and the need for "must-have" proprietary apps more imperative.

inkyoto 3y ago
> Data centers are one of the best demographics […] Hardly. Data centers are a dying breed, and their number has been rapidly dwindling in recent years. DC (and the mythical «on-prem» by extension) has effectively become a dirty word in contemporary times. The most brutal lift-and-shift approach (without discussing the merits of doing so) is most common: create a backup, spin up a cloud «VM», restore from the backup and turn the server in the DC off forever. No-one is going to even remotely consider a new hardware architecture, not even in the cloud. Moreover, since servers do not exist in a vacuum and either run business apps or do something at least remotely useful, that entails the software migration to adopt the new platform. And the adoption has to be force-pushed onto the app developers otherwise they won't bother, and for them to convert/migrate the app onto a new architecture, they need desktops/laptops that run on the new ISA, and no viable server and desktop hardware exists in June 2023 – it will come along later with «later» not having a clear definition. Talking open source is a moot point as most businesses out there run commercially procured business apps.
- intvocoder 3y ago
  This doesn’t seem to comport with Amazon’s experience, investment, and trajectory with Graviton, based on public reference customers and a few personal anecdotes. Ampere isn’t a slouch either…
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  AWS and Azure are datacenters too. You're paying a x10 markup to make accounting shenanigans easier, but the technology is exactly the same.

cjsplat 3y ago

Cloud services have a lot of back end. Cluster management, file systems, disk / storage systems, network management, database systems. None of those require user or OS instruction set compatibility for legacy apps that are hard or impossible to recompile. And most of these applications don't really require gonzo superscalar performance. Add more cores, support more data streams. If you can eliminate licensing costs for that portion of your fleet, then you only need to expand the ISA compatible portion of your fleet as demanded by paying customers. As an example, suppose all of a cloud provider's services can migrate to RISC-V. As organic demand for x86 Cloud among customers grows, services can shift incrementally to the cheaper home grown platforms. And since the freed up machines are at least partially depreciated, the cost of these servers is much less than what a customer would pay for new servers on prem. (depreciated Cap-ex, far better Op-Ex). The interesting question is the transition rate of end customer apps to the new ISA vs the growth rate of locked ISA apps. Eventually the locked ISA apps portion becomes a lot like the current IBM mainframe business. Very valuable to a very small number of customers. The only counter for this is if x86 can crank performance per $TCO so far that the non-x86 branch can't compete in business terms, which has historically been the issue with ARM.

als0 3y ago
> The only counter for this is if x86 can crank performance per $TCO so far that the non-x86 branch can't compete in business terms, which has historically been the issue with ARM. If we take AWS for example, isn't the performance per TCO better of an Arm-based Graviton instance better than x86? I don't think the historical issue you cite represents the future.
- cjsplat 3y ago
  Impossible to know from the outside. We know what they are selling it for, but that isn't the same. True TCO needs to include the cost to develop the chip - after all, that is folded into the x86 price. If you assume that the Graviton project is $250M per chip design for the 3 iterations, and the online estimates of 1 million chips is accurate, then you need to add about $750 per CPU, beyond the probably $250 per chip fab'ed and packaged. $1000 per chip gets you a lot of x86 horsepower.

doctor_eval 3y ago

I read this and immediately thought of that aphorism, which I heard back in the dialup days when it seemed the internet was never going to take off: Important changes always take much longer than we expect, but have much greater impact than we imagine.

brucehoult 3y ago

The first Graviton machines (which were worse than the current 64 core RISC-V SG2042) were installed in November 2018. Four and a half years later are now up to 20% or 25% of total AWS capacity. Even without any acceleration of adoption, it looks like they could be the majority of AWS within 10 years from first deployment. There seems to be every reason RISC-V could do it faster. Graviton 1 level chips are available right now, Graviton 3 or better coming from multiple companies (including Keller's) in 2024-2025. The software is more critical, but once x86-only things have been made portable to Arm (which can be hard work), further porting them to RISC-V is much much easier.