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> The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known
by brundolf 2y ago
> The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known to all.
Maybe silly question: the ISA has no license fee or restrictions, but does RISC-V also somehow imply that the microarchitecture will be open? (like in a GPL-style way or something?) Maybe the one in the article is open, but does RISC-V actually make that more likely in the future?
Not that a license-free ISA would be pointless otherwise, but the article feels misleading if it's possible to have closed RISC-V designs
- brucehoult 2y ago> does RISC-V also somehow imply that the microarchitecture will be open? Not at all. Most are completely proprietary. And that's fine. We're likely to end up with dozens of companies competing to license you their RISC-V cores, and lots of open source designs ranging from not very good to just a couple of years behind the commercial ones. A much better situation than having just one vendor that can go out of business or simply decide to do something else at any time (see DEC, MIPS, Sun, Intel with iPX 432, i860, i960, Itanium, ...). Or even Intel and AMD with x86. Or Arm, Apple (not selling cores or chips to 3rd parties, only finished computers), Qualcomm (being sued by Arm) in the Arm ecosystem.
- brundolf 2y agoYeah, that's what I expected. Which doesn't negate RISC-V's value, but does mean the original article said some misleading things