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A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
- moomin 1mo agoAbsolutely hugged to death.
- urbnspacecowboy 1mo agoArchived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260816073823/https://rvembedded.com/blog_post/12/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260816073823/https://rvembedde...
- deadbunny 1mo ago503 for me. So good they crashed the IA
- AlienRobot 1mo agoWe'll need an archived copy of the archived copy.
- Kwpolska 1mo agoNah, that's just Internet Archive being Internet Archive.
- ksec 1mo ago> Request Limit: 500 per minute I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.
- debo_ 1mo agoThe website runs on RISC-V.
- 201984 1mo agohttps://archive.ph/9FaRC https://archive.ph/9FaRC
- HawtAds 1mo agoI love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue: > The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
- alephnerd 1mo ago> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes... HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE. Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result. The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date. Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
- orangeboats 1mo agoNon-American here... what is DACH?
- greyb 1mo agoIt is Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
- orangeboats 1mo agoThanks! I must admit this is the first time I have heard of the acronym.
- avmich 1mo agoTo me it feels like the difference in positions is "this could be made better" vs. "but this is already so much better than before". Both are right. Maybe I'm missing something important so far...
- IshKebab 1mo agoYeah the complaints in the original article are valid, but it's like complaints about Android or iOS. There are plenty of valid complaints against either, but neither is strictly better than the other.
- ipdashc 1mo agoI was thinking the same. RISC-V is certainly impressive and I'm glad we have it, but the original article isn't wrong in its complaints either. It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.
- thayne 1mo agoMaybe. I'm not sure if the original author's intent was to say how risc-v could be better or to say it is bad and people should use other (proprietary) ISAs instead.
- phire 1mo agoIt's more of the former. Before this, the author has never recommended others stay away from RISC-V, just stated their own distaste for it and a personal preference to use any other ISA if given a choice.
- dmitrygr 1mo agoI am sorry if my point was not clear enough. I don’t advise anybody to stay away from it. In many ways it is good enough. I just think that if you were designing something from scratch, you could actually learn from past lessons, rather than publishing a document saying you learned, and then demonstrating conclusively that you didn’t.
- dmitrygr 1mo ago
- Sha1rholder 1mo agoNice read! Though it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
- kqr2 1mo agoOriginal HN discussion referenced:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298035
- epolanski 1mo agoThe author of the article just got a fan. Some serious stuff he builds on top of those chips.
- crvdgc 1mo ago[dead]
- decide1000 1mo agoThat is just an amazing website and initiative. https://rvembedded.com/products/project-lab/ https://rvembedded.com/products/project-lab/ Definitely interested!
- Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago[flagged]
- soulofmischief 1mo agoNaïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.
- Lagoon3384_SWE 1mo ago[dead]
- mohamedkoubaa 1mo agoAppeals to an ethical basis don't work on everyone
- roughly 1mo agoLet’s take the rationalist approach, then: does the author of this blog post seem like someone who could contribute reasonably to humanity’s future? Does it seem like we might be doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring them, and those like them? “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ― Stephen Jay Gould Edit: y’all really don’t like being told you should care about other people, huh?
- mohamedkoubaa 1mo agoI'm on your side, the comment I was replying to seemed to assume that the gp commentor was motivated by or at least interested in ethics.
- 1mo ago
- msla 1mo ago"Rate Limit Exceeded" Does anyone have an archive?
- msephton 1mo agoThis is the sort of content I endure this place for. Thanks for posting.
- pranav_tech26 1mo ago[flagged]
- ksec 1mo agoI don't think the Author disagree with what the original article wrote. If anything everything he said seems to reassert what the original article intended to state. And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line. "You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."
- initramfs 1mo ago"Now price the same journey on the other side, forget x86-64 and that duopoly, patent minefield, with multi-thousand dollar debug probes; we'll take a look at ARM." The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/060101.pdf https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them. " That is a better reason than elegance. and I want to tell Mr Grinberg, that the word priviledge he tosses around in his article also extends beyond the ISA depending on where you are in the world." Grinberg is an emigre from Ukraine, which isn't the most privileged place in the world. In fact his research articles go deeper than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.
- Conan_Kudo 1mo agoThere are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.
- initramfs 1mo agoThanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. <32nm). My project: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/ Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licenses-atom-class-x86-cores-to-startup-firm-reportedly-sharing-rtl-enabling-customer-to-build-its-own-custom-processors-based-on-x86-general-purpose-cores https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens... (Caveat: The startup is acquainted with the Intel CEO, so it's rare for them to grant the x86 license to non-buddies.) "Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere." What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
- gregsadetsky 1mo agoWorking archived copy - https://archive.is/9FaRC https://archive.is/9FaRC
- syncsynchalt 1mo agoIs archive.is still a malicious site that DDOS's finnish security bloggers or has that been sorted?
- b40d-48b2-979e 1mo agoNope, that is still them.
- ckot56 1mo agoI have no idea what's going on here, but the title alone gave me second-hand engineering stress. Solid post.
- ndiddy 1mo agoI think he's kind of speaking past the original author. The original piece is basically about how the author doesn't think that RISC-V will take off outside embedded, because of some design decisions that lead to poor performance compared to ARM64 and because so much of the ISA being optional means that there's too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible. Meanwhile, this piece is mainly about how RISC-V is great for embedded because companies can build it into custom chips with specifically the functionality they need, and because of how cheap it is for low-end use cases since there's no license fees. The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
- quotemstr 1mo agoDifferent RISC-V dialects might as well be as different from each other as English is from German. Sure, the cognates, family the resemblance, and common(-ish) alphabet make some things easier, but if you're shipping a manual, you still need to do it both in English and auf Deutsch unless you rely on machine translation. So it is with the family of mutually incomprehensible ISAs called RISC-V.
- Geof25 1mo agoYeah I know this mess in PowerPC. There is IBM Power, there is MPC5xx ISA, there is VLE and and several other dialects. Some processors are doing those some doing others, some needs bit to signal if program runs VLE... just crazy chaos.
- whateverboat 1mo agoThe huge number of companies building RISC-V chips and really crazy optimizations that they are doing in all kinds of spaces are a very real counterweight to your notion. And RISC-V is just starting here with shoestring design and fab budget. Wait till all engineering teams really adopt it like Tenstorrent and NextSilicon and so on.
- vlovich123 1mo agoHe says: > From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings Yet earlier: > I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
- cupantae 1mo agoI’d really like an explanation here if the author is reading. And how does shipping cost scale with quantity? Can you get that to be small per unit on big orders?
- armstrongsubero 1mo agoHi there, shipping has a floor and then it scales, but it scales far slower than the order does.... so if you buy like one resistor from DigiKey or Mouser, that starts around $60, a hundred resistors costs about the same if you add chips and weight and it climbs from there, but $60 is the floor no matter how small the order.... So per unit shipping collapses with quantity, which is why the part price matters more here, not less. The fixed cost forces you to buy deep, and only the cheap part lets you buy deep. At a dollar a part, 1000 units is a $1060 order nobody here is placing... at ten cents it is $160, and then there are 1000 parts sitting in Trinidad that nobody else has to pay $60 to reach, so you can have enough for a small product run..keep in mind we also currently have US dollar shortage, so you only get allocated a certain amount of US per quarter.... I should also have been explicit that those figures are the Western channels like DigiKey, Mouser, courier from LCSC. WCH officially sells direct on AliExpress with free shipping, which runs on postal consolidation rates that do not price by how remote you are. But that channel is a game of chance. Sometimes things just never come, there is no ARM equivalent either. I cannot buy an STM32 from ST with free shipping to Trinidad, and I cannot trust the aftermarket parts because some of them are fakes, and some vendors do not have this country in their shipping list at all.... The part I care about most is that at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. Learning embedded means killing chips, and at a dollar a part a teacher flinches, cause 1 US dollar is about 7 dollars here, and starts supervising instead of letting people find out. And the same goes for me, at ten cents I can experiment and still ship with the part I experimented on....
- ploxiln 1mo agoThis blog post is very defensive and argumentative, which I guess is fair considering Dmitry's post is similarly inflammatory, but most of it was really not convincing: > Simply put, the things a high-end CPU needs are diametrically opposed to the things a small cost-saving microcontroller core needs. > The conclusion he draws is that no single ISA can serve both ends, and that RISC-V fans are fooling themselves, in theory the premise is true. The conclusion does not follow, and I can show you why from three parts sitting on my desk as we speak. > CH32V003. This is the cheap "RV32EC" with sixteen registers, no multiplier, no divider, machine mode only, > CH32H417. A dual core MCU that is unmatched in performance to price point and is at the higher end of the MCU line > Baochip. A VexRISC-V with an MMU built around a stack thats open from silicon to os Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC for High Assurance Applications Uh, which one of these is a datacenter server cpu? Or a workstation cpu? Or at least a developer laptop cpu? How about a Raspberry Pi 4 level SBC (supporting latest ubuntu and fedora releases, driving a display that runs a browser and plays video ...) There's a lot of angry indignation but it seems obvious that Dmitry is quite right about this. But I found this is where this blog post starts making a lot of sense: > Has anyone tried adding an MMU to a Cortex-M? The physical tradeoffs are real, the difference is that with RISC-V, the ISA owner does not decide for you where that boundary must be drawn. If you want virtual memory on ARM you license a Cortex-A instead, which is a different core family, a different profile, a different negotiation, and a different royalty. > Compare what happened with Baochip. The RISC-V privileged specification defines supervisor mode and Sv32 paging as optional things an implementation may provide. VexRISC-V is an open core, somebody added an MMU to it. bunnie built a chip around it and runs a microkernel with real process isolation on it Yeah, that is a good point. We're still in the low-end specialty realm, but that is real interesting advantage for RISC-V, a good reason for it to exist. As for shipping to Trinidad and Tobago ... this post is trying too hard to turn this into moral issue, but it seems a bit random (OrangePi cost $30 and shipped free? you can also get arm-based and stuff from the same places), and the vast majority of people don't live on semi-remote islands, it doesn't make sense to consider this kind of accessibility above all else, and it's strange to blame Dmitry for not thinking of you here.
- acutelittlebox 1mo agothe author just focused on his personal experiences regarding RISC-V and what he's been able to see himself as an embedded developer. there's already RISC-V SBCs that are on par with the Raspberry Pi 5 and in terms of IPC the best RISC-V cores are only lagging 5 years or less behind the best x86 and ARM cores.
- trueno 1mo agoyo this is actually some really fire reading. i had to read it twice then go back and read the original that he's responding to here. i feel full of wonder right now seeing people who are this deep into compsci debating merits in the marketplace of ideas, there's just so much going on globally with computing that i never even get to see. super fascinating to read about the different constraints at play here even the global socioeconomic ones and how they apply to the chip world in general. it sounds like risc-v's real play is democratizing access to the entire embedded stack
- hrydgard 1mo agoMore than half the article is AI slop. Sad.
- roughly 1mo agoA fun fact about ChatGPT and its ilk is the final RL polishing of the responses was outsourced to Nigeria and other places with cheap labor, so the patterns you’re picking up in the article aren’t that the author sounds like ChatGPT, it’s that ChatGPT sounds like the author. Same reason the southern accent has overlaps with west African dialects.
- bobtheborg 1mo ago[dead]
- Ericson2314 1mo agoMy perspective using Nix is that it's hardly worth standardizing ISAs. Recompiling software is easy and we should have a Cambrian explosion of different designs. This is especially good if one scopes out a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA.
- ip26 1mo agoWhat exactly does a bespoke ISA buy you? What will justify hundreds of engineers writing a new good one & working through the compiler support? I bet it would be pretty easy for a user to interoperate between 67 different drafts of the HTTP spec once they were all written, validated, and library implementations coded. But what would that Cambrian explosion of API revs actually get you?
- mshockwave 1mo agoI disagree, compiler optimization and software ecosystem in general already take a really really really long time to build, and I think it'll take longer without a standardized low-level binary interface i.e. ISA to enable rapid distribution. And the approach you mentioned here: > a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA I think this is basically WebAssembly and PTX, and one may argue, Java bytecode. Yet look at how much efforts and time it took for WASM runtimes and JVMs to actually produce performant machine code (the "last bit per ISA" you mentioned) for just a couple of architectures! (e.g. X86 and ARM). And I wouldn't surprised if NVIDIA pour even more money on building optimization pipeline from PTX to each of their different uArchs.
- kelnos 1mo agoAn explosion of ISAs means the available talent for writing optimizing compilers will be stretched much more thinly. Unpopular ISAs will have slow, buggy codegen, and the popular ones will suffer somewhat, too.
- ChickeNES 1mo agoIt's 2026, "available talent" is my weekly allowance of tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic...
- kazinator 1mo ago> He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists. This is almost satirical. His criticisms are entirely valid, because why can't the the thing that has a free spec and will likely dominate that space ... also be good too? Can't we have all the nice things?
- Narishma 1mo agoBecause 'good' is rather subjective when it comes to ISAs.
- bsder 1mo agoBecause the people driving the RISC-V ISA all care about delivering IP and not chips and, as such, only care about the high end portion of the market. The problem is that RISC-V is never going to win at the high end. RISC-V will never have as much money driving it forward as x86 and ARM. As such, the blocks and integration will always lag. The portion of the market which RISC-V could dominate is the low-end (you know ... the same way ARM climbed up the ladder?) and nobody in charge of RISC-V cares because you have to actually ... SHIP FREAKIN' CHIPS ... and that's, you know, so icky. And this is the disconnect. Low-end embedded has a bunch of needs and the RISC-V architecture completely whiffs on many of them and has active misfeatures on others while having very little that is actively good in that space. And many of us are angry about this. It didn't have to be this way.
- hajile 1mo ago> The problem is that RISC-V is never going to win at the high end. RISC-V will never have as much money driving it forward as x86 and ARM. As such, the blocks and integration will always lag. Qualcomm recently bought Ventana and are looking at paying ARM billions (in addition to their current billions) for the privilege of designing their own cores. They sit on the RISC-V consortium and made proposals like Znew. We could be seeing a high-performance RISC-V release from Qualcomm quite soon (especially if they can simply swap out the ARM decode for RISC-V).
- egypturnash 1mo agoRate Limit Exceeded Too Many Requests You have exceeded the allowed number of requests. Your Requests: 500. Request Limit: 500 per minute. Tip: Please wait 60 seconds before trying again. A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Learns About Caching Generated HTML The Hard Way. https://archive.md/9FaRC https://archive.md/9FaRC
- logdahl 1mo agoI haven't seen this before, but this ReCAPTCHA required "mobile verification" from me, and asked me to download an app. Oh what a world we live in...
- 986aignan 1mo agoIt's been unevenly rolled out, but is mostly Google using attestation to tighten their grip. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143997
- codedokode 1mo agoFind traffic lights for me. If it required an app, I would close the page.
- kelnos 1mo agoI don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part". I don't get how both things can be true. The cost to ship something to Trinidad and Tobago has nothing to do with whether it's ARM or RISC-V; shipping the same weight of either kind of chips should cost exactly the same amount. Yes, maybe the chip cost itself of a particular ARM-based model is $0.15 while the equivalent RISC-V chip costs $0.10, but if the issue (for him and other people who live outside US/Europe) is that shipping costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than the thing being shipped, that chip-cost difference becomes irrelevant. I think he does make a great point about how fragmentation does give you better optionality: ARM is sort of like cable TV where you have a small number of product categories that each bundle a particular set of features, whereas with RISC-V you design something bespoke that does exactly what you need and nothing more. But again, this isn't going to affect shipping costs.
- jiqiren 1mo agoHe's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion. Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead. The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.
- kelnos 1mo agoIs the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips. A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.
- topspin 1mo agoBeautiful. I read the "They Should Have Known Better" article and forgot it. I've seen this before. I know it's hot air and does not matter, and I can't afford to worry about things that don't matter. When I say I've seen this before, I'm talking about ancient history: controversies so old and so laughable that they've been forgotten. When, for example, AMD handed the world AMD64/X86_64, the same things were said: fragmentation, legacy+flawed ISA, etc. That has not aged well, and "They Should Have Known Better" won't either. The "fragmentation" argument has no merit. The jumble of extension names and profiles in RISC-V are, in fact, direct evidence that RISC-V is succeeding: it's the RISC-V ecosystem aggressively, collaboratively and successfully tackling pain points and solving them. This is what RISC-V is supposed to be doing, and it's doing it, and empires are being built on it. Take this part: "The existence of CLIC and various proprietary 'fast IRQ' / auto-stacking extensions is an additional indictment." CLIC is miraculous. It's an advanced embedded interrupt controller, and it's wonderful: it brings the equivalent of ARM's NVIC to RISC-V, except better. You can implement an extremely efficient scheduler that guarantees deadlock-free concurrency: bare-metal, real-time, hardware-accelerated "Fearless Concurrency," on an MCU with no RTOS![1] Its appeal is so great that, despite still being a draft spec, the leading RISC-V MCU designers are adopting it. Espressif's ESP32-S31 has it, for example. The chaotic emergence of this awesome thing is what is condemned as an "indictment." Speaking of ESP32-S31, it's going to be a monster when silicon becomes available in quantity. This RV Embedded writing mentions MMUs a lot. Guess what? The S31 has an Sv32 MMU. It can run Linux. Not μClinux. Real Linux. It's already been done twice (that I know of) on the Espressif eval boards. People like Armstrong Subero are going to change the world with it. That's the froth of RISC-V. The ground is shaking, and the peanut gallery of ISA wizards has no power over it. In a few years, after RISC-V has lain waste to our world of proprietary ISAs and Western IP regime rent seeking, "They Should Have Known Better" will look as silly to everyone as it already looks to me. [1] https://rtic.rs/2/book/en/ https://rtic.rs/2/book/en/
- Taniwha 1mo agoESP32-P31s are cheap - samples are cheap ($5-6 for WROOM modules) production prices are going to be lower - and twice the number of pins ESP32s are known for (but say goodbye to castelated modules hand soldering is going to be harder)
- garbageweb 1mo agoYou have exceeded the allowed number of requests. Your Requests: 500 Request Limit: 500 per minute
- garbageweb 1mo agoYou have exceeded the allowed number of requests. Your Requests: 500 Request Limit: 500 per minute with no vpn
- 999900000999 1mo ago>He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists. >This is almost satirical. That's all that needs to be said. It's like comparing Unity and Godot. Unity is better in every single way but one, you have to license it from a very poorly ran company. You don't "own" your games, they ship with black box spyware. The pricing for using it can change from day to day. I swear the Unity C level employs a Magic 8 Ball and consults it for key management decisions. If you need to edit the Unity Engine source code your looking at a secret additional licensing fee which is certainly unaffordable for hobbyist and most indies. Vs Godot which is completely free under the MIT license. Everything about the above can be said for ARM as well. RISC-V is free for everyone to play with. If you think it sucks you can always fork it and jerryrig it to work on existing hardware. If you have money you can even get custom hardware for your forked RISC-V. I very much enjoyed reading this article, I'm optimistic in seeing what OPs students come up with. This is life changing technology that's essentially available to all.
- rowanG077 1mo agoI'm not a professional game maker. But having used unity in anger in the past I found Godot a breath of fresh air. What unity really wins with is the unity asset store.
- camel-cdr 1mo agoWhich may actually be a good analogy. One thing I've seen rarely discussed is existing expertise/experiance, existing varification/tooling and existing quality reference implementations. Arm wins in all of the above over RISC-V currently, if you have the money to license from/work with Arm.
- m3047 1mo agoI think I figured it out: there's wrought iron over the window...
- alightsoul 1mo agoHigh shipping costs are the reason why many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America usually have freight forwarders They locally market themselves as package lockers, po boxes or online shopping companies. It turns out the expensive shipping cost doesn't scale linearly with package size or weight. The expensive shipping cost is a base price, and only rises slowly with package weight and size. So, these freight forwarders rent a warehouse in the US, an LLC in the US for paying rent, and give away the address of the warehouse to their customers locally. Customers use the address when shopping online and their packages are dropped off at the warehouse. Then they employ people in the US to collect customer packages in the US into large bags, which are then shipped to the destination country via DHL. DHL does charge the exorbitant shipping to third world country fees of 35 to 60 to 200 dollars that people here complain about. These fees are the base price for shipping, no matter how small or light the package is. Then, to recover the fees, packages are handed over to customers at a minimum of 2.50 dollars per pound, per package. For the business to work, income from these packages has to exceed the shipping cost. In Panama, you can probably fit 100 average packages into a 25 pound bag. That bag costs like 75 dollars to ship from the US to Panama. Then you make 250 dollars when people collect the packages. Local customers trade speed for cost, trading the 35 dollar base shipping price for 2.50 dollars and an extra week of lead time to wait for collection to complete in the US. They also don't have to go to the airport to pick up their packages since the business is ideally close to their house. Businesses like Temu ship directly from china via companies such as PRS logistics and J&T express so their shipping costs to third world countries are lower and can thus bypass freight forwarders entirely so freight forwarders only remain for items sold within the US, where shipping to third world countries has a base price of at least 35 dollars, and whenever shipping to your country costs that much as a base price, even if it ships from China, or when a business only offers shipping to or within the US. Sometimes, temu is more expensive than a Freight forwarder, but the user is freed from having to handle any logistics like using a particular address and choosing and registering with a package locker and travelling to pick up packages there and the shipping price remains under 10 dollars. However you still have to use a Freight forwarder for items over 120 dollars such as laptops and some car parts because temu doesn't carry those. Freight forwarding is also done in the exact way described above in China instead of the US because websites like taobao rarely offer overseas shipping. Again employing people in china and renting warehouses near airports there. Freight forwarders also offer marine freight instead of the default air freight. Of course, renting a warehouse and employing people in the US is expensive by local standards. Worker pay alone is around 1600 dollars vs 600 locally. So, there are only a few freight forwarders which often offer b2b, and then package lockers use their sevices. To the end customer there is no distinction between a package locker and freight forwarder. Some freight forwarders also offer B2C package locker services, others are B2B only. For example nelcon cargo, Uno express, airbox, mail boxes etc are vertically integrated because they are both B2B and B2C, cft cargo is B2B only. most package lockers do not do freight forwarding themselves and use a B2B service for freight forwarding, the package locker only offers proximity and thus convenience to neighborhood customers. Air freight via Miami international airport is the default, and most freight forwarder warehouses are located near this airport. In China, the bottleneck is not price, but speaking Chinese, so it is often run by locals of Chinese descent and is more niche than shipping from the US. This also means that taobao has a lower shipping volume and thus a smaller local market. Buyee and Zen market, so called proxy services, are very similar to freight forwarders but the service is allowing foreigners overseas to purchase in Japan because most japanese companies do not offer overseas shipping. And there are a few freight forwarders in china as well.
- ghostly_s 1mo agoI lost the thread of his argument when he brought up the shipping expense: > I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on then follows with: > the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings. When shipping is so expensive, doesn't the difference between $1 and $.10 unit cost become less relevant?
- Johanx64 1mo agoDifference between $1 and $.10 is always irrelevant unless you're mass manufacturing, which I presume you aren't on a remote island. Plus, arm cortex-m0+ cores aren't $1, they are also available in $.15-$.30 range. Westeners like to buy the $.10 CH32V003 as an exercise in minimalism, after all its refreshing to work in an environment with very limited resources. For the same reason people enjoy 1KB demoscene categories. There's no economics behind it. Authors argument almost entirely leans on Aliexpress shipping things for "free" to his island. It also has arm cores, but I suppose RISC-V MCUs have smaller odds of being fakes/clones.
- alightsoul 1mo agoThe difference is shipping from the us to shipping from china. From the us you pay 200 dollars for a 1 dollar arm processor due to shipping. From china you pay 4 dollars in shipping for a 10 cent processor. Apparently buying arm processors in china is not reliable and of course you wouldn't buy a RISC v processor in the us due to shipping costs when shipping from china is 50 times cheaper.
- ricksunny 1mo agoWho uses the term '3rd world' 'third world' anymore?
- bonoboTP 1mo agoIt's Global South now. A Global South embedded engineer.
- overfeed 1mo agoBoth the old and new forms are clumsy approximations; Trinidad & Tobago is (are?) in the northern hemisphere.
- bonoboTP 1mo ago"Developing world" was the version one euphemism ago. A developing world embedded engineer.
- throwaway2037 1mo agoI totally agree. Trinidad & Tobago isn't a poor country. It is a petro state (oil and gas) in the Caribbean. GDP per capita is 20K USD. That is middle income.
- TMWNN 1mo agoIt's not darkest Africa, or Haiti, but it is sufficiently outside the normal trade routes to not have routine, inexpensive access to components that most of us here take for granted.
- aaron695 1mo ago[dead]
- Tomte 1mo agoAnd nobody has used the term in the original meaning (i.e. outside both American and Russian bloc) for the last decades anyway.
- chmorgan_ 1mo ago[dead]
- codedokode 1mo agoI disagree with some points in "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better". For example, author claims that saving and restoring all registers in interrupt handler takes too long. But this can be solved alternatively, for example: split register set for use in interrupt and normal code. Or simply add two register banks and allow switching between them (assuming interrupts are not re-enterable). But author claims that ARM is better because it has a "store multiple registers" instruction. It wouldn't help because storing multiple registers still requires multiple bus cycles, and microcontroller probably has a 32-bit bus and no cache, so saving N registers requires N memory cycles - no matter, is it done with a single instruction (ARM), or with multiple (RISC-V). And implementing this ARM instruction makes the core more complicated with little benefit. As for 3 instructions for array access, in a simple loop a compiler can convert index access to pointer increment. The real weak points of RISC-V are: - no trap on integer overflow and invalid FP results . Overflows cause vulnerabilities - no optimizations for fast context switch, which is required for dumping legacy unsafe monolithic kernels, especially in age of AI actively searching for vulns - weird vector extensions
- teo_zero 1mo ago> As for 3 instructions for array access, in a simple loop a compiler can convert index access to pointer increment. In such a simple loop where you access one field in each iteration, yes. If you happen to access more fields, or the same field in different arrays, then you have more pointers to increment.
- hajile 1mo agoIf such an instruction is so obviously important, we'll see it start popping up as a custom instruction in some cores then it will get adopted as an official extension by other companies trying to stay competitive.
- pranav_tech26 1mo ago[flagged]
- strenholme 1mo agoI believe there will come a day when RISC-V has comparable or better performance than ARM and x86_64. This is based on history: I remember when x86 performance compared to the DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. was a joke. There was a time when, if you wanted real performance, you needed to pony up $20,000-$50,000 for a workstation with a MIPS/PA-RISC/SPARC/Alpha/whatever processor. All these workstations smoked the x86 computers of the era. However, people were buying x86 computers at a far higher rate, giving Intel (and AMD) the money needed to invest in better chip designs and better fabs. Linux was, at the same time, gaining traction and, around the time the dot-com bubble popped and there were no longer companies with the money needed to get Sun SPARC workstations (or what not) at $50,000 or more a pop to start up a web business, x86 computers running Linux had nearly the same performance at a much lower price. Once the Itanium sank and x86_64 was mainstream, x86_64 was the ISA of choice for performance workstations and servers, and the RISC ISAs that survived were now mainly used in the embedded space. Indeed, ARM was never a high performance RISC processor, and it was the one that took over the embedded space while PA-RISC, Alpha, and SPARC died. The ISA for what were cheap computers become the highest performance ISA around. It has been only in the 2020s that RISC processors have gotten x86_64 levels of performance, notably in the the Apple M series of processors. So now ARM, an ISA which was geared for cheap embedded devices, has become a high performance processor, in line with x86. Right now, RISC-V is mainly being used in cheap embedded components. Considering that x86 and ARM also were made for cheap computing, until becoming the dominant high end processor, history tells us that the cheapest ISA is the one which will become the highest performance one. RISC-V currently has about the same performance as a high end Raspberry Pi. I predict it will have medium-level PC performance by the end of the 2020s.
- jackb4040 1mo agoIt's fascinating to me what you're describing. That ISA prevalence basically comes down to the anarchy of the market, and theoretical differences in the actual design don't really factor in. Is this true? Can we analyse the reasons we expect RISC-V to have better performance, and possibly even extrapolate that to a theoretically even better ISA and skip over RISC-V entirely?
- 1mo ago
- mrheosuper 1mo ago> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error Idk, if your shipping cost is $120, it sounds to me $1 is rounding error.
- mrheosuper 1mo agoAnd then OP rants about cost of debugger > A debugger for an ARM part alone a Segger J-Link costs about $600, though I guess for that $100, and add another $100 to ship,so about $200 I could get an EDU edition J-link and no chips or boards. Yaay. This is bad comparison, you can debug arm soc with <10$ debugger too/
- acutelittlebox 1mo agoi think the part that you're missing is that this is what it's like for him and people in similar regions where a huge amount of things aren't an option to begin with and many more things are far more expensive than in the US or Europe. a lot of the article is about how the best part about RISC-V is that the chips and tools are available to more of the world.
- mrheosuper 1mo agoI also live in 3rd country, and i know the pain. But if you can access to RISC V IC/tools, you can access ARM IC/tools. The Chinese basically spams those ARM IC as many(if not more) as RISC V IC. To me the author tried to hate ARM for no reason.
- ndiddy 1mo agoYeah you can get <$1 STM32 dev boards and <$4 ST-Link dongles off Aliexpress. At my last job, we kept a big bag of the ST-Link dongles in the office, then whenever someone needed to debug something they could just keep the dongle attached to that board from that point on. It was a lot more convenient than having a single expensive debugger that you had to connect and disconnect.
- 1mo ago
- germandiago 1mo agoI find the headline a lot about the "who". It sounds like trying to remove authority from the person that criticized it, but I think it is a good idea to focus on the arguments, and not on the ad-hoc assessments and conclude from there whether they are valid or not. I will read it later, no time now. Thanks for the link anyways.
- hn_submit 1mo agoGrinberg's article is highly technical and compares RISC-V to other ISAs like MIPS, x86 and ARM. This article is more about the freedom RISC-V offers, both in licensing, availability, flexibility and cost. RISC-V has put enormous pricing pressure on manufacturers like MicroChip, which is now offering its AVR line of 8-bit MCUs for pennies a piece. Too bad that the 32-bit RISC-V offerings from, among others, WCH are far more powerful at a similar price point.
- fenestella 1mo ago[flagged]
- a022311 1mo agoOne man's trash is another man's treasure. The mistake is being absolute and ignoring this fact. This post reminded me of Engineering for Slow Internet (https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet), another case where careless assumptions by better-off people can have a huge impact on others.
- nottorp 1mo agoWhat isn’t clear to me is why the article this one is a reply to is complaining that there is a third alternative for CPUs. Even if it’s not as advanced as the other 2. Would they like a world where Intel is the sole CPU supplier? We were close to that one…
- nisegami 1mo agoShipping to Trinidad and Tobago is a bit atypical. It's misguided to try to ship directly to here like you would most other countries. If you do, I can certainly see OP "pay[s] anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips". Instead, what most people actually do is have stuff shipped to a freight forwarding company in Florida who imports it to Trinidad. Ultimately, this means that goods cost 1xx% of what they cost in the US, with a weaker currency and lower wages. But the xx in that equation for many things ends up being smaller than you'd think. Of course, this also means that Trump's changes affect us as well which has been a real damper on importing stuff from outside the US through this means. As a result, I tried ordering more stuff directly from China and the experience was largely cheaper but much, much more frustrating. That is, until my most recent couple of orders where the company AliExpress contracted with to do delivery just did the same thing I described above and sent it to a forwarding company in Florida, who then passed the charges on to me. I know I'm not really commenting on any of the technical nuances of RISC-V (my take: trying to be everything to everyone isn't easy, but it can still be worth trying), but I was just so shocked to realize the OP was form the same country.
- fleroviumna 1mo ago[dead]