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I'm curious why AWS chose ARM instead of RISC-V for their in-house graviton chips.
by thayne 3y ago
I'm curious why AWS chose ARM instead of RISC-V for their in-house graviton chips.
- snvzz 3y agoRISC-V was not ready. The necessary specs were only ratified in late 2021[0]. The first batch of hardware that's compliant with these (which include Tenstorrent Ascalon) is expected to show up in 2024. 0. https://wiki.riscv.org/display/HOME/Specification+Status#SpecificationStatus-PreviouslyRatifiedSpecifications https://wiki.riscv.org/display/HOME/Specification+Status#Spe...
- brucehoult 3y agoAt the time Graviton 1 deployed in AWS (November 2018) there were only two RISC-V ASICs in the world (SiFive FE-310 and FU-540) and both were low-volume test chips with just CPU cores and some RAM and GPIO. No PCIe, no USB. Proof of concept only. The base instruction set (RV64GC + priv 1.10) was only set in stone in July 2019. And of course the Graviton project will have started in more like 2015 when RISC-V was a rapidly-iterating draft spec with no chips, just starting to transition from being a university research project to being managed by the RISC-V Foundation. A lot has changed in the last 4 1/2 years. There are now RISC-V server chips that are better than Graviton 1 (A72-class, 64 cores vs 16), with much better ones in the pipeline.