klelatti

27 ms·

421.
by klelatti 3y ago
Sorry I take all these SiFive claims with a huge pinch of salt since they did this, comparing 7nm vs 10nm: https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1415395415000817664 Great way to undermine your credibility.
422.
by klelatti 3y ago
They have also just signed a new long term contract with Arm.
423.
by klelatti 3y ago
This seems to assume that development of ISAs is done for free, which is not the case. When a firm pays Arm a licensing fee for the Arm ISA that fee helps support the development of the Arm ISA. When someone who works for SiFive or Tenstorr
424.
by klelatti 3y ago
That's not my interpretation.
425.
by klelatti 3y ago
> RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. Or (their business) not growing as rapidly as they planned or expected and so they have fallen short on their own financial projections and need to adjust. Need to be careful not to conflate Si
426.
by klelatti 3y ago
It's interesting that that they are arguing strongly (vs Qualcomm) for retaining an approach in the ISA that probably requires macro-op fusion - whilst holding at least one patent that relates to macro-op fusion.
427.
by klelatti 3y ago
Leaving aside the insensitivity of this post towards laid-off staff - which is bad enough - it doesn't actually tell current / prospective customers what has changed about SiFive's business and products. Clearly something has
428.
by klelatti 3y ago
> Free to sell pre-made cores You do know that Arm makes a tiny amount on each core licensed and that none of the firms you mention will have any interest in that business model. If they’ve spent a lot of money on a competitive design th
429.
by klelatti 3y ago
Sorry, this completely misses the point that many firms don't want to design their own CPUs, which is why Arm became so successful in the first place.
430.
by klelatti 3y ago
We all get a bit hyperbolic at times! Yes, I'm sure it's a lot less than most customers pay. I remember the WD announcement. They have open sourced the cores now I think. If you're shipping millions of drives those fees will
431.
by klelatti 3y ago
Badly wounded, maybe?!
432.
by klelatti 3y ago
Update from SiFive via Ian Cutress. Looks like 20% of employees are being laid off. https://x.com/IanCutress/status/1716921169553887296?s=20
433.
by klelatti 3y ago
No. Now at Modular.
434.
by klelatti 3y ago
It wouldn’t kill Arm. They would still license their own cores.
435.
by klelatti 3y ago
Arm's case isn't about the ISA, it's about use of IP developed by Nuvia with help from Arm under Nuvia's Arm license being used in a way that isn't compatible with the terms of Nuvia's license. IANAL but I&#x27
436.
by klelatti 3y ago
Thanks for the correction / clarification. I agree 2016-2021 isn't really a long time! Of course the Qualcomm's use of Nuvia cores is subject to the ongoing legal case so it's difficult to see how that will work out.
437.
by klelatti 3y ago
But this doesn't answer the question as to where firms go if they want to license a core rather than design in-house. Arm grew in large part because firms decided that designing CPUs cores wasn't a central competency and Arm would
438.
by klelatti 3y ago
It was very clear that they meant nothing at all. > Apple pays nothing, because they do not license ARM cores in any way, instead having a full royalty-free license for ARM ISA (and afaik covering updates too) since before ARM got big.
439.
by klelatti 3y ago
This isn’t true. Apple paid licence fees for the very first ARM Ltd processors - ARM would have had no income if they hadn’t. And there is no way that any company gets a ‘forever’ and ‘all future IP’ license just because they had an early s
440.
by klelatti 3y ago
But what would they be buying? The ISA is free. A few designs without the engineering teams that built them? Doesn’t seem that attractive.
441.
Deciphering Latest Restrictions on AI and Semiconductor Manufacturing(semianalysis.com)
7 points by klelatti 3y ago|0 comments
442.
by klelatti 3y ago
Just to add that Qualcomm have also proposed a new extension that will help keep code size down without using the C extension. It includes new load/store addressing modes, pre-post increment load/stores and load/store pairs a
443.
The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?(morethanmoore.substack.com)
405 points by klelatti 3y ago|335 comments
444.
by klelatti 3y ago
Sorry for being a bit pedantic! Just think it's interesting that ITV did some good stuff in those years. TBF I think the BBC showed it later on (in the 2000s?)
445.
by klelatti 3y ago
The World at War is fantastic, but it wasn’t made by the BBC. Rather it was made by one of the companies, Thames Television, that owned one of the UK’s commercial franchises in the 1970s and broadcast across the ITV commercial network. It’s
446.
by klelatti 3y ago
Many thanks! Yes, all fits together. By complete co-incidence I have a blog post on the various Mac CPU transitions in draft that should be out tomorrow. One mildly amusing point, which I don't think is mentioned in either link is that
447.
by klelatti 3y ago
Interesting and surprising! Is there a source for this? There seems to have been a lot of work on emulation by Gary Davidian from an early stage - starting with the AMD 29000 then 88k and then finally on PowerPC - according to his CHM oral
448.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI is in talks to sell employee shares at $86B valuation(fortune.com)
2 points by klelatti 3y ago|0 comments
449.
by klelatti 3y ago
The bridge will also be losing hundreds of tiny works of art painted on chewing gum by one man over the last two decades. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-london-67083141
450.
by klelatti 3y ago
> It seems they are trying to slap a riscv decoder with a minimum amount of work. This doesn’t make sense to me. I thought that one of the selling points of the C extension was that it was a minimal amount of work to add to the decoder.

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