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Perhaps an even bigger(?) problem is building out the software ecosystem. To be a serious alternative to something like ARM, or even RISC-V, you need support in
by jabl 3y ago
Perhaps an even bigger(?) problem is building out the software ecosystem. To be a serious alternative to something like ARM, or even RISC-V, you need support in OS kernels (at least Linux, depending on which market you're going for), LLVM and GCC backends and other toolchain support, backends for various widely used JIT compilers (openjdk, V8, spidermonkey, etc etc), optimized kernels for certain common operations (BLAS, FFT, video encoding, crypto), and so on and so on. A huge amount of manpower in getting all these pieces into shape.
- throw0101d 3y ago> A huge amount of manpower in getting all these pieces into shape. Not wrong, but a lot easier in recent years as compared to the past, as historically there were a lot of closed-source systems. Nowadays, with the popularity and ubiquity of open source, one can 'brute force' writing for Linux, GCC, and LLVM, and you've probably a sizeable portion of use cases covered. (You may have difficultly in getting things into mainline if you've got a niche ISA, so there's continuing overhead of maintaining patches.)
- JonChesterfield 3y agoQuite a lot of the compiler is a deterministic function of the ISA. I know of a company selling "we'll generate a backend from your ISA" as a product, though I suspect there's more manual typing in the background than they'd like. Compiler backends are currently mostly written by engineers but they probably shouldn't be.