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Jim 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 los
by sbuk 3y ago
Jim 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.