7 ms·

RISC architecture did change everything

41 points by ecliptik 2y ago

celticninja 2y ago
funny first paragraph, then paywall
mitchbob 2y ago
https://archive.ph/LaWr3 https://archive.ph/LaWr3
musicale 2y ago
Doug Bowser seems safe at Nintendo, but Carol Surface left Apple. I wish Calista Redmond all the best at RISC-V International.
- brucehoult 2y ago
  Callista has been VP for Global AI Initiatives at Nvidia for three months already.
  - musicale 2y ago
    I see.
    - ein0p 2y ago
      NVIDIA has a rather substantial engineering office in Redmond, WA, by the way.
musicale 2y ago
> ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested > Who[m] should we thank? he [Patterson] asked. (Given that WIRED’s parent company has a deal with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT mine our content, we should thank old WIRED stories, among others.)
tucnak 2y ago
Hackers 1995-Never gets old
- brucehoult 2y ago
  It wasn't even a tough prediction in 1995, 10 years after the first commercial RISC CPUs, and with PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers already in the hands of developers. Did they end up beating Intel's financial might? Not in the end, but they kept them on their toes for a dozen years and very likely accelerated or changed Intel's plans in the process.
  - IcePic 2y ago
    They made a serious attempt, especially when the G4 Mac was classified as "munitions". Quote: “The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the U.S. government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide.” - Steve Jobs
    - brucehoult 2y ago
      That was because of Altivec, the best SIMD ISA (and implementation) for some time. Miles better than MMX or original SSE.
      - tucnak 2y ago
        IBM POWER is still Altivec afaik at least that's what my P9 is using
        voxadam 2y ago
        POWER10 supports AltiVec too.
  - flohofwoe 2y ago
    Not to mentioned being bombarded with "No RISC - No Fun" ads in computer magazines for the Archimedes 3000 (using an early ARM CPU) when Acorn tried to break the Amiga domination in Germany in the late 80s/early 90s ;) (e.g. 'RISC being the future' was already a popular meme in the late 80s - however competing with 'transputers being the future')
phendrenad2 2y ago
Please universe, let this be the last time Hackers is referenced in conjunction with RISC-V. Let RISC-V be free from the cringe of a terrible movie from 30 years ago.
ksec 2y ago
Is this about RISC? Or RISC-V? I think many are confusing the two. And if anything over the past 30 years have shown CISC won performance computing. That is everything from PC, Smartphone or all the way to server. We need RISC for embedded and stay embedded. Right tools for the right job. We need to stop the constant ideological / fashion / hype fighting in tech space and more good old fashioned proper engineering.
- brucehoult 2y ago
  RISC-V is the most recent manifestation of the RISC insight -- and long term the most important one, mostly because it's non-proprietary and designed from the start to have room to grow and evolve. > if anything over the past 30 years have shown CISC won performance computing. That is everything from PC, Smartphone or all the way to server. That is simply untrue. Smartphones and tablets are fully (or 99.99%) running on RISC -- Arm64 is a far more pure RISC than the original Arm32 was. Apple is doing great with its RISC-based M1/2/3/4 Macs. Amazon introduced the first low end Graviton instances (same cores as a Raspberry Pi 4, but with up to 16 cores) in November 2018 and by 2022 they were reported to make up 20% of AWS capacity. They are quite likely 40% by now. Something like 90% of the top 1000 AWS customers use at least some Graviton instances. > We need RISC for embedded and stay embedded. Who is "we"? And .. waaaaay too late for that. > Right tools for the right job. We need to stop the constant ideological / fashion / hype fighting in tech space and more good old fashioned proper engineering. Absolutely. Which is why many of the best and most famous engineers in the business are now at RISC-V companies.
  - ksec 2y ago
    >Arm64 is a far more pure RISC I guess we have a very different definition of RISC. Edit: Actually found the argument [1] back then. Time flies. These debate has been going on for years if not decades so I wont go and rehash everything. There was another long thread on Realworldtech as well where Linus said something similar. But I cant find it right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19327276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19327276
    - 2y ago
tetris11 2y ago
The giddy writing really makes it difficult to read this. Anyone got a summary?
- rwmj 2y ago
  I think you can safely skip to "The year is now 2008 ..." and read from there, where the article does have a bit of interesting history and interviews with contributors.
remram 2y ago
> not just that the filmmakers knew what RISC architecture was. Or that Jolie pronounced it correctly (“risk”) How else could you pronounce it?
- great_wubwub 2y ago
  You could spell it out - "R-I-S-C". The first three letters could be "Rice" or "Rise" instead of "Riss". I suppose you could have a soft "C" - "risch" - but that's a stretch and reminds me of Sean Connery. Never underestimate the power of people to put weird sounds to letters. I used to do a lot of network stuff and somebody once pronounced MPLS (which you very much need to spell out) as "mipples" and it scarred me for life.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mr_person 2y ago
  One point twenty one jigga-watts anyone? What is obvious to you and I is not always obvious to everyone else
theandrewbailey 2y ago
https://archive.ph/LaWr3 https://archive.ph/LaWr3
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
A fun way to get people into the article making the Hackers reference, as a die hard fan of the film love to see it, but some of the takes are so out there. It wasn't "incredible" or "absurdly geeky". Anyone at the time paying attention to anything sort of "PC vs. Mac", Intel vs. Power PC etc would have heard of RISC chip developments. And it's not far-fetched to think the original writers picked up a copy of Wired or PC Magazine to notice a headline referring to it. Hardly some magical insight. Any of the geeks watching the film chuckled (or raged) at the tech references but you kinda expected to see some and of course being a hollywood film expected totally fantastical tech usage as well which the film, in all its charm, delivers in droves. Dunno what that comment on 'pronounciation' was either. Think the author either showing his age (where that falls in the gen-x-millennial-z spectrum not sure) or desire to write fiction stories rather than be a reporter, shrug.
mindslight 2y ago
> When I make Patterson rewatch the scene, he’s all smiles and pride, though he does say they mistake “refresh rate” for clock rate. I always took this to be about the overall system (culminating in graphics) performance, as Dade continues "It's not just the chip. It has a PCI bus". And in the previous scene the dudes started off talking about the video capabilities, modem, etc. It really was a magical time where there were constant new advances across every single subsystem and peripheral.
prepend 2y ago
That’s actually Acid Burn’s quote.
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo9_h3-zwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo9_h3-zwQ
tracerbulletx 2y ago
I went to a showing of Hackers in 35MM in LA last year and the director said they envisioned the hacker scene as the modern Punk music scene where computers were the instruments of creativity, like their guitars. And this is why the movie is actually timeless. It got the actual core identity that makes hackers hackers. Another fun fact is that all of the shots of them navigating through the Gibson was shot practically with glass towers and projectors and putting the camera on a track which is pretty cool.

41 points by ecliptik 2y ago

celticninja 2y ago

funny first paragraph, then paywall

mitchbob 2y ago

https://archive.ph/LaWr3 https://archive.ph/LaWr3

musicale 2y ago

Doug Bowser seems safe at Nintendo, but Carol Surface left Apple. I wish Calista Redmond all the best at RISC-V International.

brucehoult 2y ago
Callista has been VP for Global AI Initiatives at Nvidia for three months already.
- musicale 2y ago
  I see.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    NVIDIA has a rather substantial engineering office in Redmond, WA, by the way.

musicale 2y ago

> ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested > Who[m] should we thank? he [Patterson] asked. (Given that WIRED’s parent company has a deal with OpenAI that lets ChatGPT mine our content, we should thank old WIRED stories, among others.)

tucnak 2y ago

Hackers 1995-Never gets old

brucehoult 2y ago
It wasn't even a tough prediction in 1995, 10 years after the first commercial RISC CPUs, and with PowerPC Apple Macintosh computers already in the hands of developers. Did they end up beating Intel's financial might? Not in the end, but they kept them on their toes for a dozen years and very likely accelerated or changed Intel's plans in the process.
- IcePic 2y ago
  They made a serious attempt, especially when the G4 Mac was classified as "munitions". Quote: “The Power Mac G4 is so fast that it is classified as a supercomputer by the U.S. government, and we are prohibited from exporting it to over 50 nations worldwide.” - Steve Jobs
  - brucehoult 2y ago
    That was because of Altivec, the best SIMD ISA (and implementation) for some time. Miles better than MMX or original SSE.
    - tucnak 2y ago
      IBM POWER is still Altivec afaik at least that's what my P9 is using
      - voxadam 2y ago
        POWER10 supports AltiVec too.
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  Not to mentioned being bombarded with "No RISC - No Fun" ads in computer magazines for the Archimedes 3000 (using an early ARM CPU) when Acorn tried to break the Amiga domination in Germany in the late 80s/early 90s ;) (e.g. 'RISC being the future' was already a popular meme in the late 80s - however competing with 'transputers being the future')

phendrenad2 2y ago

Please universe, let this be the last time Hackers is referenced in conjunction with RISC-V. Let RISC-V be free from the cringe of a terrible movie from 30 years ago.

ksec 2y ago

Is this about RISC? Or RISC-V? I think many are confusing the two. And if anything over the past 30 years have shown CISC won performance computing. That is everything from PC, Smartphone or all the way to server. We need RISC for embedded and stay embedded. Right tools for the right job. We need to stop the constant ideological / fashion / hype fighting in tech space and more good old fashioned proper engineering.

brucehoult 2y ago
RISC-V is the most recent manifestation of the RISC insight -- and long term the most important one, mostly because it's non-proprietary and designed from the start to have room to grow and evolve. > if anything over the past 30 years have shown CISC won performance computing. That is everything from PC, Smartphone or all the way to server. That is simply untrue. Smartphones and tablets are fully (or 99.99%) running on RISC -- Arm64 is a far more pure RISC than the original Arm32 was. Apple is doing great with its RISC-based M1/2/3/4 Macs. Amazon introduced the first low end Graviton instances (same cores as a Raspberry Pi 4, but with up to 16 cores) in November 2018 and by 2022 they were reported to make up 20% of AWS capacity. They are quite likely 40% by now. Something like 90% of the top 1000 AWS customers use at least some Graviton instances. > We need RISC for embedded and stay embedded. Who is "we"? And .. waaaaay too late for that. > Right tools for the right job. We need to stop the constant ideological / fashion / hype fighting in tech space and more good old fashioned proper engineering. Absolutely. Which is why many of the best and most famous engineers in the business are now at RISC-V companies.
- ksec 2y ago
  >Arm64 is a far more pure RISC I guess we have a very different definition of RISC. Edit: Actually found the argument [1] back then. Time flies. These debate has been going on for years if not decades so I wont go and rehash everything. There was another long thread on Realworldtech as well where Linus said something similar. But I cant find it right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19327276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19327276
  - 2y ago

tetris11 2y ago

The giddy writing really makes it difficult to read this. Anyone got a summary?

rwmj 2y ago
I think you can safely skip to "The year is now 2008 ..." and read from there, where the article does have a bit of interesting history and interviews with contributors.

remram 2y ago

> not just that the filmmakers knew what RISC architecture was. Or that Jolie pronounced it correctly (“risk”) How else could you pronounce it?

great_wubwub 2y ago
You could spell it out - "R-I-S-C". The first three letters could be "Rice" or "Rise" instead of "Riss". I suppose you could have a soft "C" - "risch" - but that's a stretch and reminds me of Sean Connery. Never underestimate the power of people to put weird sounds to letters. I used to do a lot of network stuff and somebody once pronounced MPLS (which you very much need to spell out) as "mipples" and it scarred me for life.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mr_person 2y ago
One point twenty one jigga-watts anyone? What is obvious to you and I is not always obvious to everyone else

theandrewbailey 2y ago

https://archive.ph/LaWr3 https://archive.ph/LaWr3

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

A fun way to get people into the article making the Hackers reference, as a die hard fan of the film love to see it, but some of the takes are so out there. It wasn't "incredible" or "absurdly geeky". Anyone at the time paying attention to anything sort of "PC vs. Mac", Intel vs. Power PC etc would have heard of RISC chip developments. And it's not far-fetched to think the original writers picked up a copy of Wired or PC Magazine to notice a headline referring to it. Hardly some magical insight. Any of the geeks watching the film chuckled (or raged) at the tech references but you kinda expected to see some and of course being a hollywood film expected totally fantastical tech usage as well which the film, in all its charm, delivers in droves. Dunno what that comment on 'pronounciation' was either. Think the author either showing his age (where that falls in the gen-x-millennial-z spectrum not sure) or desire to write fiction stories rather than be a reporter, shrug.

mindslight 2y ago

> When I make Patterson rewatch the scene, he’s all smiles and pride, though he does say they mistake “refresh rate” for clock rate. I always took this to be about the overall system (culminating in graphics) performance, as Dade continues "It's not just the chip. It has a PCI bus". And in the previous scene the dudes started off talking about the video capabilities, modem, etc. It really was a magical time where there were constant new advances across every single subsystem and peripheral.

prepend 2y ago

That’s actually Acid Burn’s quote.

tracerbulletx 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo9_h3-zwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo9_h3-zwQ

tracerbulletx 2y ago

I went to a showing of Hackers in 35MM in LA last year and the director said they envisioned the hacker scene as the modern Punk music scene where computers were the instruments of creativity, like their guitars. And this is why the movie is actually timeless. It got the actual core identity that makes hackers hackers. Another fun fact is that all of the shots of them navigating through the Gibson was shot practically with glass towers and projectors and putting the camera on a track which is pretty cool.