4 ms·

I'm pretty bullish on RISC-V, if anyone has suggestions on how to bet some money on this instinct (invest) I'd be interested to hear about it. Openness, tooling

by kriro 3y ago

I'm pretty bullish on RISC-V, if anyone has suggestions on how to bet some money on this instinct (invest) I'd be interested to hear about it. Openness, tooling support being decent enough already and general capabilities are all good (and power comsumption could be a differentiator). Actual chips being produced. I'm curious why it's so "underrated" or sometimes even reduced to politics (China). Even with no trade war nonsense it makes quite a bit of sense for countries to move to open architectures (imo). At least I'd be a bit more comfortable betting on it as opposed to ARM where licensing terms may or may not change. Curious to see when the first mass produced RISC-V cell phones will hit the shelves (android support is announced already).

brucethemoose2 3y ago
> I'm curious why it's so "underrated" or sometimes even reduced to politics (China) Because Tenstorrent is licensing 8-wide RISC-V cores and... No one is taking them up on it to turn around and sell. Because OPENPower is ahead of RISC-V in most ways, with much better software support + IBM pushing it, yet has basically gained zero traction. RISC-V is nice ISA for high end hardware, in theory, but like other theoretical hardware its irrelevant if its not economical. In fact, I think ARM was kinda a fluke, and gained traction because of its huge embedded presence and the stars aligning among some big companies.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > No one is taking them up on it to turn around and sell. And you know that how? Because you can't buy a server with it in it? > Because OPENPower is ahead of RISC-V in most ways, with much better software support + IBM pushing it, yet has basically gained zero traction. OpenPower was simply not open. It was 'marketing' open. It was tightly controlled by a few companies and they wanted to sell you expensive CPU. Only way after RISC-V was successful did OpenPower finally change its license terms, by then it was already to late as RISC-V already had all the momentum. Being from IBM is not actually a benefit for many companies. We have seen far, far, far larger investments in RISC-V then we have ever seen in OpenPower. And I question if the software support is really that much better by now. Ventana, Alibaba, Esperanto, Tenstorrent, SiFive are all investing lots of money, there is a lot of traction. I think we should be careful predicting 10 years ahead with any confidence.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    > And you know that how? Because you can't buy a server with it in it? Nor a desktop/laptop. And running a linux desktop on it (much less a Windows desktop) is not easy from what I can tell. I want to be enthusiastic about Tenstorrent in particular, but their supposedly open market PCIe accelerator cards never materialized.
    - 0x000xca0xfe 3y ago
      I literally have a RISC-V SBC running a graphical desktop next to me right now, it's a MangoPi MQ-Pro. Sure there aren't many boards so far (good list: http://krimsky.net/articles/riscvsbc.html http://krimsky.net/articles/riscvsbc.html ), but come on, give it a couple more years! The progress is insanely fast for the hardware world.
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      You do realise it takes three to four years to go from licensing a core from someone like Tenstorrent to having a mass-production chip, on a board, in the market? We are just now in the first half of 2023 getting mass-production chips and boards using cores announced in October 2018 (SiFive U74 -- VisionFive 2, Pine64 Star64 and PineTab-V, Milk-V Mars) and July 2019 (THead C910 -- Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A, Milk-V Pioneer). This is NORMAL. It took the same amount of time from Arm A53 announced (October 2012) to Raspberry Pi 3 (February 2016) and Arm A72 announced (February 2015) to Pi 4 (July 2019) and Graviton 1 installed at AWS (Movember 2018). It takes a while, but once set in motion it is basically clockwork inevitable.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      > Nor a desktop/laptop. You realize the world doesn't evolve around you and what you need right? The market for chips is large selling them to you might not be top priority.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  I think the thing you're missing is that RISC-V is already a huge success. It's now the de facto choice for "hidden" CPUs that don't need to run user code - auxiliary CPUs in SoCs, BMCs etc. It might not seem like it because you never see those. Given that it's already a success and not going anywhere I don't think it's a stretch to think that it will eventually break into the mobile/server market. Google already announced that they're going to support RISC-V on Android.
  - pabs3 3y ago
    Those hidden cores need to be running open source firmware.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      No they don't. You can run anything you like on them.
      - pabs3 3y ago
        It isn't possible to trust or fix proprietary software, same goes even more for proprietary firmware. All firmware needs to be open source.
        IshKebab 3y ago
        You would like all firmware to be open source. I agree that would be nice. Though for most of these chips it wouldn't help too much without documentation for the chip and all its peripherals/registers, and probably a signing key to get it to actually run your code. The fact that the code is closed source doesn't really change the trust model much either since the code is usually supplied by the chip vendor. If they wanted to do nasty things and keep them secret they could do it in hardware.
    - afiori 3y ago
      It would be better if they did, but this has nothing to do with the ISA. The only possible link I can see is that you can arbitrarily modify RISC-V on your core, so it is easier to tivoize your software... but this seems like a reach.

by kriro 3y ago

brucethemoose2 3y ago

> I'm curious why it's so "underrated" or sometimes even reduced to politics (China) Because Tenstorrent is licensing 8-wide RISC-V cores and... No one is taking them up on it to turn around and sell. Because OPENPower is ahead of RISC-V in most ways, with much better software support + IBM pushing it, yet has basically gained zero traction. RISC-V is nice ISA for high end hardware, in theory, but like other theoretical hardware its irrelevant if its not economical. In fact, I think ARM was kinda a fluke, and gained traction because of its huge embedded presence and the stars aligning among some big companies.

panick21_ 3y ago
> No one is taking them up on it to turn around and sell. And you know that how? Because you can't buy a server with it in it? > Because OPENPower is ahead of RISC-V in most ways, with much better software support + IBM pushing it, yet has basically gained zero traction. OpenPower was simply not open. It was 'marketing' open. It was tightly controlled by a few companies and they wanted to sell you expensive CPU. Only way after RISC-V was successful did OpenPower finally change its license terms, by then it was already to late as RISC-V already had all the momentum. Being from IBM is not actually a benefit for many companies. We have seen far, far, far larger investments in RISC-V then we have ever seen in OpenPower. And I question if the software support is really that much better by now. Ventana, Alibaba, Esperanto, Tenstorrent, SiFive are all investing lots of money, there is a lot of traction. I think we should be careful predicting 10 years ahead with any confidence.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > And you know that how? Because you can't buy a server with it in it? Nor a desktop/laptop. And running a linux desktop on it (much less a Windows desktop) is not easy from what I can tell. I want to be enthusiastic about Tenstorrent in particular, but their supposedly open market PCIe accelerator cards never materialized.
  - 0x000xca0xfe 3y ago
    I literally have a RISC-V SBC running a graphical desktop next to me right now, it's a MangoPi MQ-Pro. Sure there aren't many boards so far (good list: http://krimsky.net/articles/riscvsbc.html http://krimsky.net/articles/riscvsbc.html ), but come on, give it a couple more years! The progress is insanely fast for the hardware world.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    You do realise it takes three to four years to go from licensing a core from someone like Tenstorrent to having a mass-production chip, on a board, in the market? We are just now in the first half of 2023 getting mass-production chips and boards using cores announced in October 2018 (SiFive U74 -- VisionFive 2, Pine64 Star64 and PineTab-V, Milk-V Mars) and July 2019 (THead C910 -- Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A, Milk-V Pioneer). This is NORMAL. It took the same amount of time from Arm A53 announced (October 2012) to Raspberry Pi 3 (February 2016) and Arm A72 announced (February 2015) to Pi 4 (July 2019) and Graviton 1 installed at AWS (Movember 2018). It takes a while, but once set in motion it is basically clockwork inevitable.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    > Nor a desktop/laptop. You realize the world doesn't evolve around you and what you need right? The market for chips is large selling them to you might not be top priority.
IshKebab 3y ago
I think the thing you're missing is that RISC-V is already a huge success. It's now the de facto choice for "hidden" CPUs that don't need to run user code - auxiliary CPUs in SoCs, BMCs etc. It might not seem like it because you never see those. Given that it's already a success and not going anywhere I don't think it's a stretch to think that it will eventually break into the mobile/server market. Google already announced that they're going to support RISC-V on Android.
- pabs3 3y ago
  Those hidden cores need to be running open source firmware.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    No they don't. You can run anything you like on them.
    - pabs3 3y ago
      It isn't possible to trust or fix proprietary software, same goes even more for proprietary firmware. All firmware needs to be open source.
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        You would like all firmware to be open source. I agree that would be nice. Though for most of these chips it wouldn't help too much without documentation for the chip and all its peripherals/registers, and probably a signing key to get it to actually run your code. The fact that the code is closed source doesn't really change the trust model much either since the code is usually supplied by the chip vendor. If they wanted to do nasty things and keep them secret they could do it in hardware.
  - afiori 3y ago
    It would be better if they did, but this has nothing to do with the ISA. The only possible link I can see is that you can arbitrarily modify RISC-V on your core, so it is easier to tivoize your software... but this seems like a reach.