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RISC-V is at-best 10-15 years away from being in the position to where ARM is now.
by sbuk 3y ago
RISC-V is at-best 10-15 years away from being in the position to where ARM is now.
- ekianjo 3y agoI have no insights about this but Jim Keller disagrees with that statement
- hashtag-til 3y agoJK got vested interested in such a wishful thinking statement. I take it as marketing and not engineering.
- sbuk 3y agoJim Keller is someone to pay attention to, but as a sibling says, JK has a commercial IP interest, which means the touted openness advantage could easily be lost. This insight comes from people who have consulted for organisations like Tenstorrent and SambaNova and both companies focussed on designing for HPC and AI. General-purpose consumer computing platform (i.e. servers, desktops and laptops) is yet to be forthcoming from anyone in the space, and they are a way off.
- camel-cdr 3y ago> which means the touted openness advantage could easily be lost I don't expect them to open source their processors, but they do definitely contribute back to the community. E.g. they open sourced their first risc-v vector implementation (ocelot) on top of BOOM. It's in order and they used it as a reference for their later out of order commercial designs, but they also could've keep it to them self's.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago> which means the touted openness advantage could easily be lost RISC-V openness has nothing to do with processor implementation, it's solely in the instruction set. The advantage it has is that it provides compatibility across vendors and anyone can become a vendor of RISC-V IP. Comercial IP doesn't affect that, and if anything makes multiple IP vendors more likely. The availability of server processors depends on the market rather than any technical limitation. If someone decides to take the risk of investing in the development of a strong server product then we'll get it. It depends on some company believing there is a market for it.
- imtringued 3y agoThat isn't how CPU design works. The microarchitecture is what matters and you can use the same techniques as x86 uses today to get good performance. Just because there is a new ISA does not mean a company cannot design a modern CPU. For example, the Vision Star Five is uses an in order CPU core that is competitive with the out of order A72 core. The performance gap on day one is much smaller. It also has UEFI support and opensource GPU drivers for Power VR are in development by imagination, so the software support will also quickly catch up or surpass ARM SBCs. The same will happen in the server market. Nobody who works on a RISCV server chip has to wait for ARM to deliver a CPU core that doesn't suck.
- pjmlp 3y agoLikewise, because there is a modern CPU, doesn't mean the relevant partners that actually matter in the industry care enough about its existence. Or that they show up in computer shops for regular buyers, instead of computer enthusiasts, used to install GNU/Linux into any kind of motherboard with a CPU on it.
- pier25 3y agoIn the overall market, probably, but in the data center?