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> Those that say that RISC-V is a viable replacement for x86 or ARM in the near term are kidding themselves. I strongly disagree with how this frames the conve

by kibwen 2y ago

> Those that say that RISC-V is a viable replacement for x86 or ARM in the near term are kidding themselves. I strongly disagree with how this frames the conversation. For most applications our desktop machines could be 10x faster if application programmers were incentivized to care about performance. I'd happily take a 2.5x slowdown for cheaper, simpler, non-proprietary hardware. And that leads into the next point: > RISC-V implementations in the wild lack advanced features that modern CPUs rely on for speed, including sophisticated pipelining mechanisms, out-of-order execution capabilities, advanced branch prediction, and multi-tiered cache hierarchies. Most commercial RISC-V chips remain in-order processors, meaning they execute instructions sequentially rather than optimizing their order for performance. Get your pitchforks out, because I consider this a feature. Spectre should have been a wakeup call that these performance optimizations are incompatible with secure computing. "Look how much faster our new minivan careens off the nearest cliff and explodes in midair!" is not the selling point people seem to think it is. I'm eagerly awaiting a RISC-V mainboard for the Framework for this reason. If I want performance, I'll use a burner PC. If I want security, I want a CPU design where it's actually tractable to make it secure.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> non-proprietary hardware RISC-V does not guarantee that the CPU core designs are open-source, that the chip designs are open-source, that your computer doesn't use Secure Boot, that your computer doesn't have proprietary drivers, or that your computer doesn't use DRM at the hardware level. It's only an instruction set. A good first step, but only that. Don't get people's hopes up.
stackskipton 2y ago
>I strongly disagree with how this frames the conversation. For most applications our desktop machines could be 10x faster if application programmers were incentivized to care about performance. But they are not going to be. Google and Slack is going to chomp RAM and burn my CPU cycles and my desire to use RISC-V isn't going to change their behavior. If you want people to use your hardware, you have to meet them where they are.
rangestransform 2y ago
you're in the excruciatingly tiny minority of users that care about spectre, most non-enterprise customers aren't significant enough targets to exploit with a spectre type attack vs. less sophisticated attacks like phishing

by kibwen 2y ago

gjsman-1000 2y ago

> non-proprietary hardware RISC-V does not guarantee that the CPU core designs are open-source, that the chip designs are open-source, that your computer doesn't use Secure Boot, that your computer doesn't have proprietary drivers, or that your computer doesn't use DRM at the hardware level. It's only an instruction set. A good first step, but only that. Don't get people's hopes up.

stackskipton 2y ago

>I strongly disagree with how this frames the conversation. For most applications our desktop machines could be 10x faster if application programmers were incentivized to care about performance. But they are not going to be. Google and Slack is going to chomp RAM and burn my CPU cycles and my desire to use RISC-V isn't going to change their behavior. If you want people to use your hardware, you have to meet them where they are.

rangestransform 2y ago

you're in the excruciatingly tiny minority of users that care about spectre, most non-enterprise customers aren't significant enough targets to exploit with a spectre type attack vs. less sophisticated attacks like phishing