5 ms·

>Don't expect RISV-V to directly compete with Intel/AMD on the high end for at least another decade Actually 2024. SiFive P870, Tenstorrent Ascalon, SOPHON SG

by snvzz 3y ago

>Don't expect RISV-V to directly compete with Intel/AMD on the high end for at least another decade Actually 2024. SiFive P870, Tenstorrent Ascalon, SOPHON SG2044, Ventana Veyron, and more.

rwmj 3y ago
Rivos too ...
- snvzz 3y ago
  Rivos hasn't announced anything. There's several other companies we know are working on processors but haven't announced a thing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
brucehoult 3y ago
2023-2024 for the cores. Add 3-4 years for cores to make their way into CHEAP mass-production hardware. People who describe this as "not in the near future" are probably still in school. Not a decade. For sure not "at least a decade".
- wwtrv 3y ago
  > 2023-2024 for the cores. If your benchmark is x86 from ~2016-2018 then maybe. But the competition is moving forward as well (and Intel, AMD and ARM have a lot more money to invest into R&D)
  - snvzz 3y ago
    >and Intel, AMD and ARM have a lot more money to invest into R&D Yet their ISAs are much more complex and thus they actually need to invest that much more money.
    - wwtrv 3y ago
      > more complex and thus they actually I could make a similarly unsubstantiated claim that their chips are much faster than RISC-V ones because of that (of course they are unambiguously faster it's just that this is not the only reason). And anyway if RISC-V is to become competitive it will have to become much more complex as well..
      - brucehoult 3y ago
        You are incorrect. Debate won't prove it, but it's true and time will tell -- and not very much time, at that.
        wwtrv 3y ago
        > You are incorrect. > Debate won't prove it, I find this (almost) religious style fanaticism about something as mundane as an instruction set quite fascinating.
        snvzz 3y ago
        Your parent post is throwing braindead CISC dogmatism, blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value. Brucehoult's response is fitting. RISC-V is inevitable.
        wwtrv 3y ago
        Exactly. It's really fascinating that people view this as an ideological/religious thing. It might even seem that some treat RISC-V as some sort of a cult? > CISC dogmatism Besides the fact that your understanding of what CISC/RISC means seems to be stuck in the 90s and the distinction is pretty much irrelevant at this point, you do actually realize that ARM is a RISC architecture? > blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value For microcontrollers? Sure. For high-end/general purpose chips? RISC-V cores will have to implement many 'optional' extension to become competitive.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    I can't see any reason why the exact same engineers and managers who designed Apple M1 released in November 2020 would get less than M1 performance when they design a RISC-V chip at a new company, and most likely they already had ideas in their heads to make better-than-M1 but had to leave out. So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts. Sure, M1 or M2 class RISC-V hitting the market in 2026 or 2027 is hitting an old performance mark and Apple will have moved on. Even if not the absolutely fastest thing in the world at that point, M1 performance in 2027 is still going to be a totally usable machine for most people for most purposes. I'm typing this on an M1 Mac Mini I bought in November 2020 and I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. You can make whatever comparison you want between M1/M2 and x86.
    - wwtrv 3y ago
      > I can't see any reason why the exact Wouldn't they need to implement a bunch of additional extensions which RISC-V doesen't currently have just to reach feature parity? That alone would've introduced significant delays. Also it took Apple 8 or so years to build a competitive desktop/laptop CPU. They released their first custom ARM core in 2012 and likely relied a lot on what they learned while working with Cortex so it's not like they started completely from scratch. And we're talking about Apple, very few if any other companies are willing to invest as much time and resources into a product targeting a stagnant or even shrinking market (desktops/laptops) with very low margins. I don't think Qualcomm can't design something that would be competitive with M1/2 they probably don't just see a lot of sense in that financially. How would RISC-V change this? Of course there are political reasons for Chinese companies (being increasingly cutoff from western tech to invest into RISC-V) which might be more important than financial ones. So a shift to RISC-V would be almost guaranteed to increase our reliance on China which in no way could be viewed as something positive... > I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. And presumably you would be fine to replace it when as machine which is just as fast in 5 years just because it used a RISC-V CPU despite there being significantly faster ARM/x86 devices on the market?
      - brucehoult 3y ago
        > it took Apple 8 or so years to build ... likely relied a lot on what they learned Apple doesn't build or learn anything. The people they employ to work there do. When those people go to another company ... e.g. a RISC-V company ... they take that learning with them.
crote 3y ago
If we look at the single benchmark available directly comparing RISC-V to x86, the SG2042 is about comparable to a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2012[0]. That's roughly 11 generations behind. There is definitely going to be a market for RISC-V, but in all likelihood that primarily means eating ARM's lunch and highly specialized workloads. To directly compete with AMD/Intel they are going to have to be within the same ballpark of performance and cost about the same and consume about the same amount of power. There is simply no way in hell that is going to happen in 2024, not with the amount of catchup they have to do. Even Tenstorrent's own Jim Keller expects their Ascalon to be behind Zen 5 in raw performance / GHz, and Ventana's slides show it barely beating 2021 CPUs[1] which are in turn already massively outperformed by current-gen ones[2]. I fully expect a few RISC-V products to be only a generation or 2/3 behind within a couple of years, but that is simply not enough to be a direct competitor. [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00381.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00381.pdf [1]: https://www.servethehome.com/ventana-veyron-v1-risc-v-data-center-processor-hot-chips-2023/ https://www.servethehome.com/ventana-veyron-v1-risc-v-data-c... [2]: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-bergamo-epyc-9754-cloud-native-sp5/2/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-bergamo-epyc-9754-clou...
- snvzz 3y ago
  I wouldn't label the Chinese SG2042 as representative of RISC-V as a whole. It is the XuanTie C910 open source core. It has been available for many years. I have no reason to question Jim Keller nor Wei-han Lien ability to deliver, with their proven track record of delivering. Tenstorrent presentation late last year talked chiplet availability in 2024. That's the best estimate we can work with, for Tenstorrent specifically. There's multiple other companies and cores we're aware of, and then the others we don't even know of. e.g. Rivos has a strong team that's been silently cooking something for a very long time now. It could emerge at any time.

by snvzz 3y ago

>Don't expect RISV-V to directly compete with Intel/AMD on the high end for at least another decade Actually 2024. SiFive P870, Tenstorrent Ascalon, SOPHON SG2044, Ventana Veyron, and more.

rwmj 3y ago

Rivos too ...

snvzz 3y ago
Rivos hasn't announced anything. There's several other companies we know are working on processors but haven't announced a thing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

brucehoult 3y ago

2023-2024 for the cores. Add 3-4 years for cores to make their way into CHEAP mass-production hardware. People who describe this as "not in the near future" are probably still in school. Not a decade. For sure not "at least a decade".

wwtrv 3y ago
> 2023-2024 for the cores. If your benchmark is x86 from ~2016-2018 then maybe. But the competition is moving forward as well (and Intel, AMD and ARM have a lot more money to invest into R&D)
- snvzz 3y ago
  >and Intel, AMD and ARM have a lot more money to invest into R&D Yet their ISAs are much more complex and thus they actually need to invest that much more money.
  - wwtrv 3y ago
    > more complex and thus they actually I could make a similarly unsubstantiated claim that their chips are much faster than RISC-V ones because of that (of course they are unambiguously faster it's just that this is not the only reason). And anyway if RISC-V is to become competitive it will have to become much more complex as well..
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      You are incorrect. Debate won't prove it, but it's true and time will tell -- and not very much time, at that.
      - wwtrv 3y ago
        > You are incorrect. > Debate won't prove it, I find this (almost) religious style fanaticism about something as mundane as an instruction set quite fascinating.
        snvzz 3y ago
        Your parent post is throwing braindead CISC dogmatism, blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value. Brucehoult's response is fitting. RISC-V is inevitable.
        wwtrv 3y ago
        Exactly. It's really fascinating that people view this as an ideological/religious thing. It might even seem that some treat RISC-V as some sort of a cult? > CISC dogmatism Besides the fact that your understanding of what CISC/RISC means seems to be stuck in the 90s and the distinction is pretty much irrelevant at this point, you do actually realize that ARM is a RISC architecture? > blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value For microcontrollers? Sure. For high-end/general purpose chips? RISC-V cores will have to implement many 'optional' extension to become competitive.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  I can't see any reason why the exact same engineers and managers who designed Apple M1 released in November 2020 would get less than M1 performance when they design a RISC-V chip at a new company, and most likely they already had ideas in their heads to make better-than-M1 but had to leave out. So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts. Sure, M1 or M2 class RISC-V hitting the market in 2026 or 2027 is hitting an old performance mark and Apple will have moved on. Even if not the absolutely fastest thing in the world at that point, M1 performance in 2027 is still going to be a totally usable machine for most people for most purposes. I'm typing this on an M1 Mac Mini I bought in November 2020 and I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. You can make whatever comparison you want between M1/M2 and x86.
  - wwtrv 3y ago
    > I can't see any reason why the exact Wouldn't they need to implement a bunch of additional extensions which RISC-V doesen't currently have just to reach feature parity? That alone would've introduced significant delays. Also it took Apple 8 or so years to build a competitive desktop/laptop CPU. They released their first custom ARM core in 2012 and likely relied a lot on what they learned while working with Cortex so it's not like they started completely from scratch. And we're talking about Apple, very few if any other companies are willing to invest as much time and resources into a product targeting a stagnant or even shrinking market (desktops/laptops) with very low margins. I don't think Qualcomm can't design something that would be competitive with M1/2 they probably don't just see a lot of sense in that financially. How would RISC-V change this? Of course there are political reasons for Chinese companies (being increasingly cutoff from western tech to invest into RISC-V) which might be more important than financial ones. So a shift to RISC-V would be almost guaranteed to increase our reliance on China which in no way could be viewed as something positive... > I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon. And presumably you would be fine to replace it when as machine which is just as fast in 5 years just because it used a RISC-V CPU despite there being significantly faster ARM/x86 devices on the market?
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      > it took Apple 8 or so years to build ... likely relied a lot on what they learned Apple doesn't build or learn anything. The people they employ to work there do. When those people go to another company ... e.g. a RISC-V company ... they take that learning with them.

crote 3y ago

If we look at the single benchmark available directly comparing RISC-V to x86, the SG2042 is about comparable to a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2012[0]. That's roughly 11 generations behind. There is definitely going to be a market for RISC-V, but in all likelihood that primarily means eating ARM's lunch and highly specialized workloads. To directly compete with AMD/Intel they are going to have to be within the same ballpark of performance and cost about the same and consume about the same amount of power. There is simply no way in hell that is going to happen in 2024, not with the amount of catchup they have to do. Even Tenstorrent's own Jim Keller expects their Ascalon to be behind Zen 5 in raw performance / GHz, and Ventana's slides show it barely beating 2021 CPUs[1] which are in turn already massively outperformed by current-gen ones[2]. I fully expect a few RISC-V products to be only a generation or 2/3 behind within a couple of years, but that is simply not enough to be a direct competitor. [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00381.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00381.pdf [1]: https://www.servethehome.com/ventana-veyron-v1-risc-v-data-center-processor-hot-chips-2023/ https://www.servethehome.com/ventana-veyron-v1-risc-v-data-c... [2]: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-bergamo-epyc-9754-cloud-native-sp5/2/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-bergamo-epyc-9754-clou...

snvzz 3y ago
I wouldn't label the Chinese SG2042 as representative of RISC-V as a whole. It is the XuanTie C910 open source core. It has been available for many years. I have no reason to question Jim Keller nor Wei-han Lien ability to deliver, with their proven track record of delivering. Tenstorrent presentation late last year talked chiplet availability in 2024. That's the best estimate we can work with, for Tenstorrent specifically. There's multiple other companies and cores we're aware of, and then the others we don't even know of. e.g. Rivos has a strong team that's been silently cooking something for a very long time now. It could emerge at any time.