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Qualcomm to Bring RISC-V Based Wearable Platform to Wear OS by Google
- photonbeam 3y agoAre they designing the riscv cores themselves?
- rwmj 3y agoIt looks like it, yes.
- akmittal 3y agoThis is such a big news for RISC-V adoption.
- codetrotter 3y agoSpeaking of RISC-V. Earlier today I was thinking that I’d like to buy a desktop machine with a RISC-V CPU and came across one that seems aimed at computationally demanding stuff: https://www.crowdsupply.com/milk-v/milk-v-pioneer https://www.crowdsupply.com/milk-v/milk-v-pioneer Anyone had any experiences with the company behind MILK-V? Seems nice. Would like to order.
- snvzz 3y agoI'd wait for tomorrow's announcement (SG2038) before making any decisions. We already know SG2038 uses SiFive P670+X280. That's the ratified Vector 1.0 spec, unlike SG2042.
- rwmj 3y agoIf you have money to burn then sure. We have some on the way. However performance isn't that great, the core (C910) has a bunch of hardware bugs, and as the sibling comment notes Sophgo have just announced the successor.
- rwmj 3y agoHere's the announcement of the successor chip (not a successor to the Milk-V although I suppose that will come later): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37927575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37927575 It's interesting although not surprising that they ditched T-Head.
- aurareturn 3y agoIn my opinion, all the RISC-V showing lately from Qualcomm is related to their Nuvia acquisition and the ensuing lawsuit with ARM regarding licensing Nuvia core designs. Qualcomm is most likely doing this to put pressure on ARM. If/when the lawsuit is finished, I expect Qualcomm is deprioritize RISC-V projects.
- LeFantome 3y agoBut why? What does ARM offer that is superior?
- kramerger 3y agoNot really where OP was headed, but... I would say RISC-V is still unmature in some areas. ARM is far more than ISA, for example the interrupt controller in a modern ARM SoC is more complex than a RISC-V core. Can anyone provide a viable RISC-V alternative with proper Linux support soon? Another issue is performance. We simply don't know how RISC-V performs compared to latest ARMs.
- rickdeckard 3y agoThat's why I believe it's a smart move to start with Android Wear as target-platform. It narrows the scope to less I/O, smaller screen-resolutions, lower cost, no cellular modem, yet still the same OS-architecture and moderate/high sales-volume. Good target to ramp up a new platform...
- snvzz 3y ago>for example the interrupt controller in a modern ARM SoC is more complex than a RISC-V core. RISC-V has the AIA[0], a pretty good interrupt controller. It is a requirement in the platform spec. https://github.com/riscv/riscv-aia https://github.com/riscv/riscv-aia
- ffgjgf1 3y agoHigh-end cores you can license? Besides that ARM still seems to be superior to RISC-V in pretty much every way besides the fact that you have to deal with ARM itself. Which might also be a positive thing in some cases i.e. designing your own cores from scratch should be much more expensive than licensing from ARM.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated/dupe from earlier today: Snapdragon X Series chips are heading to PCs to take on Apple's processors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899676 Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919907
- demondemidi 3y agoRV needs an ecosystem to survive. Google can afford the hockey-stick dev costs, but 95% of the rest of OEMs cannot. Hopefully Google makes their tooling open source, that would really help shave years of RV adoption.
- snvzz 3y agoRISC-V is rapidly building the strongest ecosystem.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoYet it’s extremely weak compared to ARM and x86 atm
- smoldesu 3y agoRoughly a decade ago, that's what people said about ARM too: "A licensed RISC ISA? Why use that when MIPS and PowerPC and x86 exist?" For the most part, all it took to put ARM on the board was to get it's core designs on newer silicon. RISC-V will likely be the same, with the added advantage that most software projects already support RISC arches through ARM.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- demondemidi 3y agoI don't think you realize that we WANT RiscV to succeed. Stop being so defensive. It really doesn't have a solid ecosystem yet and the ISA is still in its infancy. Debug is awful and security is still in rev0.x stage. If you want it to be real, stop playing the internet "i win the argument" game, understand where RISCV is deficient, and use your energy to actually help.
- smoldesu 3y agoI wanted ARM to succeed too. I have the original Rev2 RasPi board sitting 10 feet away from me, for all the good an ARMv6 SOC does me in 2023. Even back at release it was little more than a glorified embedded SOC that could boot Linux for giggles. I'm willing to acknowledge goofy trash for what it is. RISC-V feels like it's coming around to the same track. Much like how Broadcom had to shoulder the software support of the Raspberry Pi, Qualcomm et. al are going to have to do roughly the same thing now. If the support on top of those cores is good enough, it won't really matter who makes the chip (a-la ARM's ecosystem). The current cores are certainly on the simple side, but that's the name of the RISC game. Simply having a capable microcontroller spec is enough to dent ARM's market share.
- ge96 3y agoI want to ask this ignorant question Other than being OS, cheaper... For the consumer do they need to know that it's risc v? Would a laptop instead of saying "Intel" or "ryzen" it would say risc v on the sticker... Otherwise it's still windows or ChromeOS?
- maven29 3y agoIntel put in a lot of legwork into ensuring that x86 is a first-class citizen on android, and this has far-reaching effects. Beyond just building against the android runtime, it is now trivial to support additional architectures at every stage of the pipeline, even for native code. Although x86 has the advantage that all dev workstations use it for VMs, at one point Google even had a MIPS version of the playstore, not to mention how different V7 and V8a are within ARM architectures.
- solarkraft 3y ago> Although x86 has the advantage that all dev workstations use it for VMs Mine is based on ARM
- smoldesu 3y agoEven post-2020, I've seen vanishingly few production stacks that "just work" using ARM virtualization.
- silisili 3y agoComparing apples and oranges. Ryzen is a product name, Intel a brand name. It would be similar to Snapdragon and Qualcomm, respectively. You wouldn't see riscv on the sticker the same way you don't see x86-64 or arm64 on the sticker.
- rwmj 3y agoThe most likely way you'd get this is by buying some cheap smartwatch. All of those are currently powered by Arm chips and it's unlikely that the general consumer knows anything about that. Your laptop or desktop might well have RISC-V cores in it already. They are present in at least WD drives and some nVidia GPUs. But any time you need a cheap embedded core and don't want to pay licensing fees or deal with contracts is a case where you might choose RISC-V.
- thinkerswell 3y agoQualcomm is hitting it out of the park.