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busywork ... but maybe good marketing - people somehow believe that ISO has some relationship to quality.
by jgord 11mo ago
busywork ... but maybe good marketing - people somehow believe that ISO has some relationship to quality.
- blurbleblurble 11mo agoGood marketing, this could open up more large investment into RISC-V.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoBe honest, what does RISC-V offer that 10 year old AArch64 doesn't already provide? RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
- kryptiskt 11mo agoLess legal risk, ARM has grown litigious and wants a bigger piece of the pie.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoIP costs real money, and consumers usually don't care how people split up their pies. 100% of a small pie is worth far less than a slice from a large pie. I've met people that made that logical error, and it usually doesn't end well. =3
- blurbleblurble 11mo agoWhat does <open source anything> offer that trusty old <proprietary burden> doesn't already provide?
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoI would agree for FPGA soft-cpu the RISC-V is an obvious choice. But in general, the next question will be which version did you deploy, and which cross-compiler do you use. All the documentation people search will have caveats, or simply form contradictory guidance. The problem isn't the ISA, but the ill fated trap of trying to hit every use-case (design variant fragmentation.) ARM 6 made the same mistake, and ARM8/9 greatly consolidated around the 64 bit core design. Indeed, an ISO standard may help narrow the project scope, but I doubt it can save the designs given the behavior some of its proponents have shown. =3
- Pet_Ant 11mo agoPeople complain about fragmentation, but I feel like they are missing the forest for the trees. In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V. I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others". As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoSure, but what we saw was most software simply disabled the advanced vendor specific features in ARM, and still only compile for stable code around the core IP. This is an important phenomena committee consensus couldn't reconcile. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
- mrbluecoat 11mo agoWhile the sentiment is a bit harsh, the performance gap noted is real. RISC-V has a ways to go to catch up to ARM64 and then finally AMD64 but if the Apple M1 taught us anything, it's possible.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoRISC-V shouldn't try to catch 40 years of spiral-development, but rather focus on something people can gather momentum around. amd64 wasn't a great design, but provided a painless migration path for x86 developers to 64bit. Even Intel adopted this competitors architecture. I like the company making a multi-core pseudo GPU card around RISC-V + DSP cores, but again copying NVIDIA bodged on mailbox style hardware is a mistake. It is like the world standardized around square-wheels as a latency joke or something... lol Making low-volume bespoke silicon is a fools errand, and competing with a half-baked product for an established market is a failed company sooner or later. I think people are confusing what I see with what I would like to see. An open ISA would be great, but at this point I can't even convince myself I'd buy a spool of such chips. =3
- blurbleblurble 11mo agoCorrect me if I'm wrong but I'd imagine the performance gap has almost nothing to do with RISC-V and everything to do with implementation.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoLike everything in tech... the answer is "it depends": the barrel-shifter in ARM is considered energy-efficient. Also, most RISC design concepts are using more numerous simpler instructions at higher clock-rates, and doesn't rely on mystery microcode to pull off the same workloads as amd64 etc. ARM8/9 is quite good, but partly because a lot of the unused legacy chip features were stripped out. RISC-V had potential, but is still too fragmented... It is the value proposition to companies that is a problem, and in the current consumer market it will likely meet the same fate as PowerPC. =3 "Why the Original Apple Silicon Failed" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tld91M_bcEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tld91M_bcEI
- kazinator 11mo agoPeople with absolutely no technical clue who only know "ISO 9001" equate "ISO" with quality initiatives and certifications. What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability. ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions. If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium. That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoA standard 64bit+DSP RISC-V would go a long way for undoing the fragmentation damage caused by the "design by committee" implications. ..it was the same mistake that made ARM6 worse/more-complex than modern ARM7/8/9. =3
- kazinator 11mo agoAs if we have never seen design-by-committee damage coming from ISO? Have you heard of this C++ thing? :)
- Joel_Mckay 11mo ago> Have you heard of this C++ thing? The STL was good, but Boost proved a phenomena... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect ISO standards are often just a sign Process-people are in control =3
- IshKebab 11mo ago> is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions I doubt it - the ISO standard will still allow custom extensions.