5 ms·

Not an industry expert.. just a curious onlooker, but this is not surprising in the slightest - though I am surprised the VC firehose has been turned off this s

Not an industry expert.. just a curious onlooker, but this is not surprising in the slightest - though I am surprised the VC firehose has been turned off this soon. I thought they'd float along on stupid money for longer. From the start they seemed overfunded and with no real good long term business model. They have no lock-in because of the whole open nature of RISC-V. - They're not designing for any specific in-house purpose like Alibaba/Western-Digital - The low end will always be dominated by Allwinner and company and they can't win - The high end is competing with x64 and huge companies like Intel.. also can't win unless you're Apple They make non-pricecompetitive middle of the road chips that nobody really needs other than RISC-V enthusiasts.. And at the end of the day effectively anyone can come in and do what they're doing at any point. The latest announcement seems to show they're finally shifting to the strategy their Chinese competitors have been doing for years. Open RISC-V cores and then get lock-in with custom NPUs. I doubt they'll be able to compete with Chinese firms there though Cool idealistic company, but at the end of the day making cool stuff isn't in itself a business model - and you gotta make money to pay the bills RIP

edrxty 3y ago
I mentioned it elsewhere but a big draw is FPGA soft cores or others forms of embedded CPU stuff. ARM licensing terms are bonkers so riscv has a major advantage if you need something better than a NIOS II or Microblaze (soft cores that Intel and Xilinx provide respectively).
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  with so mych of xilinx' lineup having hard arm cores built in, what is the driver for soft cores?
  - edrxty 3y ago
    Flying radiation hardened FPGAs is a big one. Just because a chip exists doesn't mean it's usable for any given application.
  - tverbeure 3y ago
    Ease of use. The area of a small soft core is trivial. And having a small CPU core all for yourself and dedicated to manage one piece of hardware without having to deal with an operating system and other processes interfering is incredibly convenient. See my other comment.
- notacoward 3y ago
  I worked at a company that designed whole systems from chips on up. I thought it was odd that they chose MIPS as a base architecture, until someone explained that the alternatives all had far higher licensing costs. IP licensing for other parts of the chip was already their second biggest cost after payroll, so I guess that made sense.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I feel like it will converge to just having RV + FPGA chips rather than people wasting precious FPGA space on softcores. Zynq's are plenty popular already
  - edrxty 3y ago
    Easier said than done. Lots of Zynqs on orbit and elsewhere right now but if you want to do anything at all custom you're stuck with soft cores because regardless of who you are, I know for sure you don't have the money to do a custom chip.
  - tverbeure 3y ago
    It's common to have high performance CPU cores for the main tasks yet still have small microcontroller cores sprinkled all over the place for specific sub-block management, even in FPGAs. For example, a small 5-stage pipelined VexRiscv CPU take around 2000 logic elements. That's nothing in today's large FPGAs. Add, say, 4KB of RAM and put it right next to the complex HW core that you want to manage and you have the equivalent of a complex FSM that's programmable without any worries about having to share cycles with other processes and missing out events with hard real-time requirements. It's done all the time, and it's great.
- tails4e 3y ago
  The latest microblaze is already RISC-V under the hood, but of course other vendors can be used too.
pipo234 3y ago
Sounds like they were basically a victim of venture capital. First the pressure to grow (too) rapidly, then the gutting for failure to deliver. Growing a company with wild ambitions sustainably is hard. I feel sorry for the employees that tried. And of course 9 women can't deliver a baby in one month.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. As far as I can see, there was no option other than to grow rapidly. They'd need to have matched Intel/Qualcomm/etc. to have any chance of success. VC gave them money on the initial RISC-V hype but then the hyped died down. There was like a good year or two with no real affordable products on the market and the software/toolchains were all half-baked. It also became clear that an open instruction set doesn't really bring you any huge "win". As far as I can see, the necessary subsequent waves of VC with deeper pockets never materialized (like MagicLeap had managed) The Chinese competitors were also very quick and managed to catch up and in essence beat them to market - so they've lost any first-mover advantage
  - antupis 3y ago
    yup this is those cases where VC money makes sense, or at least tactic should complete different without VC-money.
  - pipo234 3y ago
    > I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. I guess it makes sense from the investment angle. Ie. need to grow, and need to grow fast, therefore need for lots of cash, therefore need for risk takers. But at the same time not so much so for the angle of is growth realistically possible for this type of company? It took ARM over 30 years to organically grow with ups and downs to what it is today, in an age where the foundry landscape was much less complex wand wild chip design innovations were much more common. (We had SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, i960, 68k, Itanium, Transmeta in the nineties.) From what I read, SiFive had broad ambitions and wasn't very focused. Not sure if it is viable, but expecting it to turn $$$ into competitive chip designs in a couple of years was a bit of a stretch.
thereddaikon 3y ago
RISC-V has a lot of potential to eat ARM's lunch and adoption by companies like Qualcomm signal a future industry shift to it. The problem for SiFive is none of that requires them to be around to see it happen. The success of the startup and ISA are not inextricably linked. They did a lot of important work early on to cheerlead for RISC-V and to build much needed support and infrastructure for it. But this feels to me like the end of the beginning for RISC-V and a transition to a stage where the industry will drive it from here. The other day Qualcomm announced a RSIC-V based Android wearable SoC. Expect to see full smartphone SoCs in shipping devices in a few years. ARM's attempts to extract more value after going public and lawsuit with Qualcomm is souring their relationships and driving customers to RISC-V.
- klelatti 3y ago
  But this doesn't answer the question as to where firms go if they want to license a core rather than design in-house. Arm grew in large part because firms decided that designing CPUs cores wasn't a central competency and Arm would do a better job. And for a long time even a firm with the resources of Qualcomm couldn't outperform Arm. Maybe (say) Tenstorrent will take up the mantle but just saying that 'the industry will drive it' doesn't really describe how Arm gets replaced.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    > And for a long time even a firm with the resources of Qualcomm couldn't outperform Arm. For a long time (around 2010 to 2016) the internally developed Qualcomm ARM core did outperform the cores you could license from ARM. Qualcomm's internal team fell behind and then Qualcomm started licensing the standard ARM designed cores. Now Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and wants to develop their own custom cores again. We will see how it goes. Most of the old Qualcomm ARM CPU team went to Microsoft for a few years, got laid off, and now actually work for ARM.
    - klelatti 3y ago
      Thanks for the correction / clarification. I agree 2016-2021 isn't really a long time! Of course the Qualcomm's use of Nuvia cores is subject to the ongoing legal case so it's difficult to see how that will work out.

edrxty 3y ago

I mentioned it elsewhere but a big draw is FPGA soft cores or others forms of embedded CPU stuff. ARM licensing terms are bonkers so riscv has a major advantage if you need something better than a NIOS II or Microblaze (soft cores that Intel and Xilinx provide respectively).

galangalalgol 3y ago
with so mych of xilinx' lineup having hard arm cores built in, what is the driver for soft cores?
- edrxty 3y ago
  Flying radiation hardened FPGAs is a big one. Just because a chip exists doesn't mean it's usable for any given application.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  Ease of use. The area of a small soft core is trivial. And having a small CPU core all for yourself and dedicated to manage one piece of hardware without having to deal with an operating system and other processes interfering is incredibly convenient. See my other comment.
notacoward 3y ago
I worked at a company that designed whole systems from chips on up. I thought it was odd that they chose MIPS as a base architecture, until someone explained that the alternatives all had far higher licensing costs. IP licensing for other parts of the chip was already their second biggest cost after payroll, so I guess that made sense.
ilyt 3y ago
I feel like it will converge to just having RV + FPGA chips rather than people wasting precious FPGA space on softcores. Zynq's are plenty popular already
- edrxty 3y ago
  Easier said than done. Lots of Zynqs on orbit and elsewhere right now but if you want to do anything at all custom you're stuck with soft cores because regardless of who you are, I know for sure you don't have the money to do a custom chip.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  It's common to have high performance CPU cores for the main tasks yet still have small microcontroller cores sprinkled all over the place for specific sub-block management, even in FPGAs. For example, a small 5-stage pipelined VexRiscv CPU take around 2000 logic elements. That's nothing in today's large FPGAs. Add, say, 4KB of RAM and put it right next to the complex HW core that you want to manage and you have the equivalent of a complex FSM that's programmable without any worries about having to share cycles with other processes and missing out events with hard real-time requirements. It's done all the time, and it's great.
tails4e 3y ago
The latest microblaze is already RISC-V under the hood, but of course other vendors can be used too.

pipo234 3y ago

Sounds like they were basically a victim of venture capital. First the pressure to grow (too) rapidly, then the gutting for failure to deliver. Growing a company with wild ambitions sustainably is hard. I feel sorry for the employees that tried. And of course 9 women can't deliver a baby in one month.

contrarian1234 3y ago
I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. As far as I can see, there was no option other than to grow rapidly. They'd need to have matched Intel/Qualcomm/etc. to have any chance of success. VC gave them money on the initial RISC-V hype but then the hyped died down. There was like a good year or two with no real affordable products on the market and the software/toolchains were all half-baked. It also became clear that an open instruction set doesn't really bring you any huge "win". As far as I can see, the necessary subsequent waves of VC with deeper pockets never materialized (like MagicLeap had managed) The Chinese competitors were also very quick and managed to catch up and in essence beat them to market - so they've lost any first-mover advantage
- antupis 3y ago
  yup this is those cases where VC money makes sense, or at least tactic should complete different without VC-money.
- pipo234 3y ago
  > I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. I guess it makes sense from the investment angle. Ie. need to grow, and need to grow fast, therefore need for lots of cash, therefore need for risk takers. But at the same time not so much so for the angle of is growth realistically possible for this type of company? It took ARM over 30 years to organically grow with ups and downs to what it is today, in an age where the foundry landscape was much less complex wand wild chip design innovations were much more common. (We had SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, i960, 68k, Itanium, Transmeta in the nineties.) From what I read, SiFive had broad ambitions and wasn't very focused. Not sure if it is viable, but expecting it to turn $$$ into competitive chip designs in a couple of years was a bit of a stretch.

thereddaikon 3y ago

RISC-V has a lot of potential to eat ARM's lunch and adoption by companies like Qualcomm signal a future industry shift to it. The problem for SiFive is none of that requires them to be around to see it happen. The success of the startup and ISA are not inextricably linked. They did a lot of important work early on to cheerlead for RISC-V and to build much needed support and infrastructure for it. But this feels to me like the end of the beginning for RISC-V and a transition to a stage where the industry will drive it from here. The other day Qualcomm announced a RSIC-V based Android wearable SoC. Expect to see full smartphone SoCs in shipping devices in a few years. ARM's attempts to extract more value after going public and lawsuit with Qualcomm is souring their relationships and driving customers to RISC-V.

klelatti 3y ago
But this doesn't answer the question as to where firms go if they want to license a core rather than design in-house. Arm grew in large part because firms decided that designing CPUs cores wasn't a central competency and Arm would do a better job. And for a long time even a firm with the resources of Qualcomm couldn't outperform Arm. Maybe (say) Tenstorrent will take up the mantle but just saying that 'the industry will drive it' doesn't really describe how Arm gets replaced.
- lizknope 3y ago
  > And for a long time even a firm with the resources of Qualcomm couldn't outperform Arm. For a long time (around 2010 to 2016) the internally developed Qualcomm ARM core did outperform the cores you could license from ARM. Qualcomm's internal team fell behind and then Qualcomm started licensing the standard ARM designed cores. Now Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and wants to develop their own custom cores again. We will see how it goes. Most of the old Qualcomm ARM CPU team went to Microsoft for a few years, got laid off, and now actually work for ARM.
  - klelatti 3y ago
    Thanks for the correction / clarification. I agree 2016-2021 isn't really a long time! Of course the Qualcomm's use of Nuvia cores is subject to the ongoing legal case so it's difficult to see how that will work out.