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Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

computerworld.com.au

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Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#71

Post by yaantc »

raverbashing wrote: post #57
dom0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just getting a license from ARM is 10+ million dollars. Which license? ARM offers several different models. > Apple creates their own CPU and GPU designs, Google has custom hardware for machine learning, and Samsung is about to overtake Intel as the world's largest chip manufacturer. Why should they keep shelling out billions to ARM, Intel, and AMD just to use their ISA? The Google hardware we know (TPU) for learni…

Well, a 10 million dollar license is nothing of you factor the Fab costs

Apples and oranges. The companies that design the chips and pays royalties for IP are mostly fabless (with rare exceptions like Intel). The fabs are owned by separate entities like TSMC, Samsung, SMIC that specialize in the production itself. The fabs don't pay for CPU IP (they sometimes pay for some other basic IP to be able to offer them as standard to their customers, but that doesn't cover CPUs/GPUs).

About Samsung, they're on both sides but with separate legal entities.

The licensing cost IS usually significant to most fabless companies, who come in many sizes. Most are not as big as Apple or NVidia. The fabless model comes from the very high cost of a modern fab, it allows sharing a fab through many fabless design houses.

ARM has the reputation of being cheap, because the typical IT/software people compare them to Intel. And yes, compared to Intel most anyone is cheaper ;) But in the embedded space, which is cost sensitive, ARM is not cheap. It's like what IBM and Microsoft were in IT: nobody got fired for choosing them, and they come with a very powerful ecosystem. Something they make client pay for.

In front of ARM, one can find good technical competitors depending on the target market (MIPS, Cortus, Andes, Beyond Semi...). But MIPS ecosystem is smaller, and for the others waaaaay smaller.

RISC V has an opportunity in time to provide a good technology, backed by a strong ecosystem, for lower costs. In the embedded space at least, this is a very powerful combination.

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#72

Post by sweden »

I see on this thread a lot of people getting blind-folded by the "open-source" term attached to the headline of this article.

First of all RISC-V can mean more than one thing: it can refer to the architecture, which is in fact open and free to use, or it can refer to the implementation of the same architecture, which will not be necessarily free or open source. For example, check the so claimed SiFive company which was promising free and open source implementations of RISC-V: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331690

"“A year ago there was quite a debate if people would license a core if there was a free version, [but now] we’ve seen significant demand for customers who don’t want an open-source version but one better documented with a company behind it,” said Jack Kang, vice president of product and business development at SiFive."

By the end of the day, they just decided to follow ARM's path by providing license fees to their CPUs.

Secondly, when people say that RISC-V is "free" and "open-source" and that will allow companies to create cheaper and more open hardware, that is just an illusion. There are many more things on a SoC other than a CPU (like memories, communication buses, GPUs, power management processors, and so on). Cutting costs on a CPU will not make the cost of an SoC go down to zero, the CPU is just a small part of the puzzle. With RISC-V, you either need to implement the CPU yourself (which will be extremely expensive and time consuming) or you will have to find someone who provides with CPU cores already implemented. And of course that you need to have support and guarantees that the cores you bought will work on silicon. There will be always a huge cost associated when shipping CPUs, you can't escape from that.

You can already imagine that open-source hardware doesn't play by the same rules as open-source software, it's a completely different game with completely different rules.

And people speak of ARM's royalties like if they were a very bad thing. Truth to be told, the royalties you pay ARM can be a very good deal taking into account that you get access to silicon proven CPU cores, support from the best engineers in the industry and you automatically get covered by the many CPU patents that ARM owns. And you can even choose on how you want to pay for ARM's CPU licenses: you can either choose to license an already implemented CPU design by ARM or you can buy an architectural license and implement your CPU completely from scratch (this is what Apple and Qualcomm are current doing). You don't need to be completely tied to ARM. Even in the royalty fees you can choose whether you want to pay a big upfront license fee but then paying low royalties per device or you can choose to pay a low upfront license but compensating on the royalties per device.

There is a lot of misinformation going around the possibilities of RISC-V, mostly of this misinformation coming from people involved in the development of the spec. Don't be fooled by the buzzwords "open-source hardware" and "free hardware".

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#73

Post by analognoise »

CalChris wrote: post #67
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of things that make RISC-V different from OpenSPARC. One is that OpenSPARC is not a very scalable design, it could probably only ever work in servers and workstations, and workstations are essentially a monoculture. Another reason is timing: manufacturing processes have effectively stopped yielding performance and power gains as the fundamental constraint (distance between components on chip) doesn…

> RISC-V is amenable to a wide array of microarchitectural decisions As is ARMv8. Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Apple are all architectural licensees with radically different microarchitectural implementations. For example, Nvidia is Transmeta code-morphing style implementation. Also, Intel and AMD continue to innovate in the x86 space. At this date, RISC-V has no fundamental advan…

" You're lining up against Usain Bolt and your advantage is that you're wearing organic cotton. That's just not gonna work."

I'm stealing this as a saying.

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#74

Post by yaantc »

CalChris wrote: post #67
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of things that make RISC-V different from OpenSPARC. One is that OpenSPARC is not a very scalable design, it could probably only ever work in servers and workstations, and workstations are essentially a monoculture. Another reason is timing: manufacturing processes have effectively stopped yielding performance and power gains as the fundamental constraint (distance between components on chip) doesn…

> RISC-V is amenable to a wide array of microarchitectural decisions As is ARMv8. Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Apple are all architectural licensees with radically different microarchitectural implementations. For example, Nvidia is Transmeta code-morphing style implementation. Also, Intel and AMD continue to innovate in the x86 space. At this date, RISC-V has no fundamental advan…

You're right, but key words here are "At this date". What you said could have been said exactly in the same way about Linux against commercial Unices about 15 years ago. It's a long game here, and we're only in the early phase. And it may not take that long, but we'll see.

Regarding technology, just as Linux initially the key is not having a technological advantage, but being cheaper and good enough. The improvements can come later, when the ecosystem gets bigger and more resources pours in.

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#75

Post by sweden »

jbarham wrote: post #53
webaholic wrote: post #29

RISC-V is atleast 10 years away from competing with x86 and ARM. It is just now getting to a point where it can power arduino class hardware. Long way to go... but looks promising.

The Freedom E310 chip in the HiFive1 board is shipping today and is already competitive with embedded ARM: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1/#comparisons . It's comically faster (i.e., 100x) than the AVR chip in the Arduino Uno board, but the similar form factor makes it cheap & easy for early adopters to play around with. I'd bet that within five years a good proportion, even the majority, of Amazon & Googl…

That sheet doesn't mean anything, they are comparing a microcontroller clocked at a frequency of 300 MHz with microcontrollers clocked at 30 MHz.

Of course that they have better performance... Misleading marketing material.

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#76

Post by sweden »

wyager wrote: post #43
figers wrote: post #37

Isn't ARM the RISC solution that is already here? Already dominating mobile, Microsoft is soon to be announcing x86 apps running on Windows on ARM

ARM is too license-encumbered. If we're going to switch away from x86, it might as well be to something that admits free development and production.

Things are not that straight forward, I wrote a better comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14284409

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#77

Post by microcolonel »

CalChris wrote: post #67
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a number of things that make RISC-V different from OpenSPARC. One is that OpenSPARC is not a very scalable design, it could probably only ever work in servers and workstations, and workstations are essentially a monoculture. Another reason is timing: manufacturing processes have effectively stopped yielding performance and power gains as the fundamental constraint (distance between components on chip) doesn…

> RISC-V is amenable to a wide array of microarchitectural decisions As is ARMv8. Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Apple are all architectural licensees with radically different microarchitectural implementations. For example, Nvidia is Transmeta code-morphing style implementation. Also, Intel and AMD continue to innovate in the x86 space. At this date, RISC-V has no fundamental advan…

NVIDIA's Denver is a feat; I think that if it says anything, it's that ARM's instruction encoding is deficient. AArch64 instruction encoding is less dense than AMD64, and completely lacks compressed instructions (like Thumb). To NVIDIA, it made more sense for them to write a realtime binary translator for an internal ISA which is clearly enabling their microarchitecture more than ARM is.

AMD and Intel spend more money on research than you can even imagine, and it's not surprising that they manage to make x86 machines that lead in single-thread performance, but since Intel tried Itanium, you can tell their designers feel x86 is deficient. I mean, just imagine how much of their chips is just decode.

Also, not to get too childish, but ironically NVIDIA is one of the vendors who is shipping RISC-V in a lot of products. Soon enough, that Denver-style core is going to be sitting on a die right next to a RISC-V. ;- )

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#78

Post by psydk »

After enjoying coding on 680x0 in my youth and later being frustrated by x86, I acclaim that new ISA. There is a design decision I'm curious about but I could not find related information. How did they come with the names "x0, x1, x2..." for general purpose registers, instead of the more conventional "r0, r1, r2..."?

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#79

Post by jbarham »

sweden wrote: post #72

I see on this thread a lot of people getting blind-folded by the "open-source" term attached to the headline of this article. First of all RISC-V can mean more than one thing: it can refer to the architecture, which is in fact open and free to use, or it can refer to the implementation of the same architecture, which will not be necessarily free or open source. For example, check the so claimed SiFive company which w…

> You don't need to be completely tied to ARM.

The point is that if you want to use the ARM ISA you have to pay ARM. Not so with RISC-V. Anyone is free to fab a RISC-V chip without paying royalties.

Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs

#80

Post by sweden »

yaantc wrote: post #74
CalChris wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC-V is amenable to a wide array of microarchitectural decisions As is ARMv8. Applied Micro, Broadcom, Cavium, Huawei, Nvidia, AMD, Samsung and Apple are all architectural licensees with radically different microarchitectural implementations. For example, Nvidia is Transmeta code-morphing style implementation. Also, Intel and AMD continue to innovate in the x86 space. At this date, RISC-V has no fundamental advan…

You're right, but key words here are "At this date". What you said could have been said exactly in the same way about Linux against commercial Unices about 15 years ago. It's a long game here, and we're only in the early phase. And it may not take that long, but we'll see. Regarding technology, just as Linux initially the key is not having a technological advantage, but being cheaper and good enough. The improvements…

RISC-V is thrown around like if it's an already working CPU but it is not. It is just a document describing an ISA, you can't compare it to Linux, it's a completely different thing.

There are a lot of costs in implementing an ISA and that includes: design, functional verification, physical implementation and software testing. All those steps together will require hundreds and hundreds of engineers, many expensive tools and thousands of man-hours. And once you are done, you will need to find be careful not to violate any patents while shipping your CPU to the end customer.

By paying a license fee to ARM, you get all these steps done for you plus with support.

Linux is something that you can download from kernel.org, compile overnight and get it booting right away. RISC-V is something that you need to build yourself.

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