3 ms·

Won't RISC-V make it easier to copy and improve on designs?

• bsder 3y ago
  Loongson is MIPS not RISC-V. The issue is whether China will get behind the RISC-V stuff and contribute to a semi-unified ecosystem or whether the individual companies will fuck it up by balkanizing everything in an attempt to one-up their competitors. I'm not optimistic. The West mostly doesn't really care about RISC-V. ARM licensing costs don't seem to be completely out of line unless you are talking super-cheap devices--which mostly come from China. (A good counterexample is Nordic Semiconductor. They are having to compete against cheap Chinese BLE alternatives so they needed to start looking at RISC-V).
  • suprjami 3y ago
    This poster knows what's up. I'd put money on a future which looks exactly like this.
  • creer 3y ago
    I was answering the parent remark which was about RISC-V. And my point is that if RISC-V achieves a significant amount of open designs and tooling then anyone who joins is roughly speaking guaranteed parity (in design - something like ISA and microarchitecture, not in foundry). Which is much better than the current situation.