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RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
- ColdStream 3mo agoIt was a decent little talk this one. Now that we are seeing RVA23 chips available we are starting to at least see a lot of software packages actively compiled for the platform. They aren't optimized much at all but they do run. I am cautiously optimistic about the future of RISC-V. It is likely to start biting at the heals of ARM in another 5 years or so, and having no licensing fees makes it very attractive in that sense. Qualcomm and Apple will be very interesting in avoiding as many ARM licensing fees as possible even if initially in embedded systems. But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM and so it might not be so great for the end users. Time will tell. All I know is that I look for the seeing Apple Silicon 2 launching in 2036 using this stuff. ;)
- random3 3mo agoCan you elaborate on > But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM
- not-a-llm 3mo ago[dead]
- Joel_Mckay 3mo agoMany of the underlying IP areas of RISK-V advanced features are not public implementations. Yet there are still a lot of great projects around, that may end up in China grey market chip fabs (C950) at some point. https://github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex https://github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex ARM64/AArch64 is about constrained consistency, but most RISCV standards groups still fail to recognize their ISA version fragmentation was a serious mistake. So no, it won't exist outside niche use-cases until the kids stop arguing over what RISCV even means in a general end-user context (BOOM flags, RVA23, etc.) =3
- pantalaimon 3mo agoWe still have to see a RISC-V implementation that comes even close to the performance of ARM
- rwmj 3mo agoRivos was competitive. Sadly bought by Meta and "disappeared" into the company.
- ColdStream 3mo agoThey are still a LONG way from parity in terms of performance per watt. Best I have seen is about 1/6th as efficient. But this seems to be an issue of no current chips are what you would consider even remotely high end in terms of the groups working on them and the manufacturing nodes they are using. But there is a lot of progress in space and it appears to be picking up pace. The only issue is that it risks becoming very fragmented.
- SanjayMehta 3mo ago5 years ago there was a req on the Apple job site for engineers familiar with RISC-V. https://riscv.org/blog/apple-exploring-risc-v-hiring-risc-v-high-performance-programmers-anton-shilov-toms-hardware/ https://riscv.org/blog/apple-exploring-risc-v-hiring-risc-v-...
- throawayonthe 3mo agotbf apple does a bunch of embedded programming too
- crote 3mo agoIt would be more surprising if Apple wasn't exploring RISC-V - even if only for use in auxiliary chips.
- JSR_FDED 3mo agoI thought Apple has a special deal with ARM as they were an early investor?
- cold_pizz4 3mo agoWhile the consumer market is still years away from widespread RISC-V adoption, if you pay attention to the embedded / MCU market (especially Espressif & co) you will indeed come to the conclusion that RISC-V is inevitable and software maturity will probably come from these early adopters. Go!
- rwmj 3mo agoKrste wasn't even saying anything controversial. It's obvious that manufacturers will use the cheapest (free) least legally entangled option, and that this adoption will happen first amongst those with the tightest margins. And - Clayton's law[1] - it will eventually extend to the rest of the market (albeit over a very long time). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
- incrudible 3mo agoThe good RISC-V designs are not free though and the free ones are not good. MCUs are not a category of computer to draw lessons from for the broader market.
- rwmj 3mo agois what every company that didn't understand disruption said.
- hughw 3mo agoiirc Christenson's chief example was IBM not deigning to cannibalize their high-end disk drive business by competing on the new, less capable low-end devices.
- cold_pizz4 3mo agoWait a few years until a RISC-V Fab as a Service emerges and any teenager with an LLM can design and order their own chips ;)
- modulovalue 3mo agoI'm working on making SIMD better in Dart. Dart supports RISC-V as a target architecture for compilation, but I'm not really excited about figuring out how to map the wasm-SIMD-style primitives to RISC-V's RVV and so I don't really plan to look into it at all. This is mostly because their approach to SIMD is so different, but also because I can't test it at all. Are there any RISC-V "machines"? that one can use to do something useful or fun with that someone here could recommend? I guess it would be fun seeing all my SIMD-fiable use-cases become orders of magnitude faster on RISC-V, too, but I sadly never hear anything about machines that use RISC-V.
- aarroyoc 3mo agoThere are several RISC-V machines. In the microcontroller world it's becoming more and more usual, but those won't have RVV. SpacemiT K3 based machines are probably your best bet when it comes to RISC-V processors with SIMD support. There are several manufacturers: Milk-V with the Jupiter II, Sipeed, Banana Pi, ...
- brucehoult 3mo agoThe THead C906 core is full Linux-capable but is microcontroller-adjacent and has an early draft version of RVV that is different in details but has the same flavour (and at least some code is binary-compatible with RVV 1.0). Recent GCCs RVV intrinsics compile to either RVV 1.0 or the 0.7 draft (named XTHeadVector now) so if you're programming at that level they're compatible. Milk-V Duo starts at $3 for a tiny board with a 1.0 GHz C906 running Linux, a 700 MHz microcontroller config C906 (no MMU etc), and 64 MB RAM. Well, I paid $3 ... then they were $5 for several years and now I see $11 at arace.tech. There are also 256MB and 512MB versions, with the larger one also having an Arm A53 core. That's actually got full 128 bit SIMD with all data types supported up to 64 bit int and FP. You can also buy bare CV1800B and SG200x chips (Sophgo bought original designer Cvitek and enhanced the design)
- pdpi 3mo agoYou can buy a RISC-V mainboard for the Framework Laptop, and it's relatively cheap (£170) https://frame.work/gb/en/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard https://frame.work/gb/en/products/deep-computing-risc-v-main...
- jhvkjhk 3mo ago> “CHERI is not an extension; CHERI is a new base,” Asanović clarified to the keynote audience. > Addressing concerns that creating a new base ISA might fracture the open-source community, Asanović offered a devoted defense to EE Times. “CHERI is too invasive to be a simple extension on regular RISC-V, and so needs a new base ISA for that reason,” To me it sounds like they're creating RISC-VI before RISC-V even winning the market.
- rwmj 3mo agoThere's zero chance CHERI will go anywhere, I wouldn't worry about it.
- rando1234 3mo agoYeah, I feel like Rust has killed Cheri.
- pjmlp 3mo agoCHERI is valuable even for unsafe Rust code.
- rwmj 3mo agoThe problems with CHERI are not whether it's technically good or not, it's organizational. It's an academic project that requires everyone to boil the ocean. They tried to get ARM interested and that didn't go anywhere and now they're trying to get RISC-V interested. But they haven't addressed any of the problems of why manufacturers would ever make a complex and completely incompatible chip for a problem that they (the manufacturers) don't have and don't care about, that can probably be solved 90% as well in software.
- panick21_ 3mo agoThe manufactures will do what costumers demand and if they demand safty then cheri will make a lot of sense to many costumers. And you cant rewritte 50 years of C in Rust. And even in Rust you can still run into various issues.
- thrownawaysz 3mo agoIf we go by Apple's architecture history we will get a new one, maybe RISC-V, in 2036. m68k (1984) > PPC (1994) - 10 years PPC (1994) > x86 (2006) - 12 years x86 (2006) > ARM64 (2020) - 14 years ARM64 (2020) > ??? (2036) - 16 years
- speed_spread 3mo agoExcept that ARM is pretty much theirs, or at least they have complete control over it, which they never did for any previous arch. They also handle chip production directly. Nothing in RISC-V could be worth more than what they can already wring out of ARM without having to migrate.
- crote 3mo agoThat all depends on their current licensing terms, doesn't it? Besides, ARM-to-RISC-V doesn't require a full redesign. Plenty of components are going to stay more-or-less the same, the big change is the instruction decoder. Chip developers have done far more drastic redesigns while staying with the same ISA - just look at the history of x86. I think the bigger question is: does Apple want to go through another binary compatibility break?
- Tostino 3mo agoLook into Apple's ARM licensing terms. They are very generous to apple.
- sapiogram 3mo agoARM could change that in the long term, Apple doesn't own them. It would be a generational fumble by ARM to lose Apple as a customer, though.
- Tostino 3mo agoThe license agreement they signed a few years back goes into the 2040s. Long term, you are right obviously. That is just so long term, so much can happen in that time span it's hard to even guess.
- red_admiral 3mo agoMy money is still on ARM. They, and their clients who produce the actual processors, have options to fight back if RISC-V ever becomes a serious competitor for, say, smartphones.
- tpxl 3mo agoWhat options are those? Anything they do that makes ARM better/cheaper for consumers makes RISC-V a win, even if it never reaches mainstream adoption.
- theturtletalks 3mo agoExactly why every user of a product should be an strong supporter of the competitor. It's what keeps your product honest and competition is good for the consumer.
- mytailorisrich 3mo agoRisc-v bexomomg a competitor is bemeficial for ARM's clients as it gives them leverage in price negotiations, which they don't have at the moment.
- dismalaf 3mo agoLol they tried to sue one of their biggest customers (Qualcomm) and lost... No one wants to deal with ARM, the licensing fees are insane, etc... RISC-V is inevitable the same way Linux and open source were, because companies like Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, MediaTek, etc... would all be better off not paying ARM, all else being equal.
- valentynkit 3mo ago[dead]
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoWhy can't anyone build a performant RISC-V cpu? The SpacemiT K3 seems to be the fastest available right now, and it's basically a joke. https://www.phoronix.com/review/spacemit-k3-pico-itx/3 https://www.phoronix.com/review/spacemit-k3-pico-itx/3 I'm starting to get the feeling that there is something fundamentally broken in the RISC-V specification that fundamentally limits performance.
- snvzz 3mo ago>and it's basically a joke. Look up the fab process node and die area of that chip, and think again.
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoI get that they can make super tiny cheap processors, but why isn't there one faster than a 4 year old raspberry pi?
- dismalaf 3mo agohttps://tenstorrent.com/newsroom/tenstorrent-sets-new-performance-records-launches-tt--ascalon-s https://tenstorrent.com/newsroom/tenstorrent-sets-new-perfor... It's already happening. If you mean for consumer hardware though, it'll probably be a few more years. Even ARM hasn't really taken off for Windows. Hard to overcome developer inertia for consumer devices, whereas for datacenters it's easier as all the apps are custom anyway.
- tliltocatl 3mo ago> I'm starting to get the feeling that there is something fundamentally broken in the RISC-V specification that fundamentally limits performance. RISC-V is an objectively bad ISA design (a resell of MIPS dropping some of the most ominous features, then trying fix the code density issue with billions of extensions), but x86 is way worse and it didn't prevent Intel from making performant implementations. And RISC-V is certainly not bad in the way that would limit performance (well, maybe code density, but it's not the major issue). The reality is, ISA matters very little for CPU performance. What really matters a lot is the memory subsystem and interconnect. I. e. good DRAM controllers IP are pricey - way more pricey than ARM cores AFAIK. Not a problem unique to RISC-V - i. e. Altera memory controllers used to be shit as well, not sure if Intel changed anything. And another issue - there doesn't seem to be all that much money in CPUs any more. Look at ARM's history with high-performance sector.
- PaulRobinson 3mo agoHeadline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.
- rzerowan 3mo agoI believe in microcontrollers its already pretty ubiquitous , see their utilisation by WesternDigital with their SwerV core thats already shipping since 2019. At speeds and complexity comparable to desktop/server cores from Intel/AMD they are still lagging in perf though improving as more cores get deployed. Also to add into the mix the whole geopolitics with non-US players hedging. So potential is there will just depend on what will be the base case like Windows was for Intel.
- hmry 3mo agoNon-US hedging will be big for RISC-V in the future, but the geopolitics can also cut the other way. E.g. US banning US companies from using Chinese RISC-V chips, to protect their domestic players. Especially now that intel is partially state-owned.
- LastTrain 3mo agoThere is a limit to how much of that the US can do without causing self inflicted damage.
- dismalaf 3mo agoQualcomm, AMD and Nvidia are heavily investing in RISC-V, Intel's foundry produces RISC-V chips and the US government investment is largely because Intel has a SOTA foundry. Not just x86.
- invokestatic 3mo agoFirmware & systems dev here, ARM still dominates in the microcontroller space. There are some niche offerings from major vendors but again they are niche. Espressif is the sole exception with their newer ESP32-C series chips, but they can get away with it due to their massive HAL. ARM Cortex is still the standard because there’s a decade or two of inertia behind it. An apt comparison would be C vs Rust. Yes, Rust may be growing in market share, but C still dominates.
- usui 3mo agoRISC architecture is gonna change everything
- sylware 3mo agoEverything pushing forward RISC-V is a good thing (this time I get it right...) I code RISC-V assembly almost everyday, beyond the major point that it is a NON-IP-LOCKED ISA (unlike arm and x86-64), it feels like it does 'sweet spot' nearly all the time. Namely, I am more into binary specifications which means, if RISC-V is zapped one day, we still have some RISC-V byte code and port to an IP-LOCKED ISA is reasonable. The hard part: _really performant_ micro-architectures for server/desktop/embedded/mobile on latest silicon process. The harder part: getting much binary-only 'critical' software running there (for instance desktop video games). And the super hard part: big mistakes _will be made_, and it is going to hurt ooofely.
- sph 3mo agoI have no experience with ARM, but after decades of x86, low-level programming or OS development with RISC-V is such a breath of fresh air. Writing a simulator from scratch for the base ISA is like two days of work tops. I am using RISC-V as the instruction set for a bespoke virtual machine: why design a ISA when RISC-V is simple and modular? Bonus: all compilers can now target my VM. It will accumulate cruft over the years like all other platforms, but right now, it is a joy to work in. It’s not just for fun, but I’m betting on it because I hope Europe will finally build its own chips, and there is a good likelihood they will choose RISC-V over ARM; expertise in that field for EU developers might soon be a plus.
- sylware 3mo agoYep, I guess we are many to see what's happening with RISC-V. The most risk of cruft accumutation is in RVA... which is pursuing some level x86-64/ARM hardware compatibility. That said intel APX/AVX10.2 is RISC-V for x86-64...