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Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

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Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#61
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Linux distro probably, at least initially.

Does Huawei sell Linux laptops today? Why not? Why would that change? If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea, why would RISC-V/Linux laptops be a good idea? People love to come up with fantasies and try to work backwards from them, but sometimes you really can't get there from here.

They sell windows intel laptops, pretty good ones, but now they’ve been shut out of that market, so they may very well make RISC laptops with Linux or some proprietary OS.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#62
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.

Can you explain, why CPU's do not scale so well?

I am not an expert but I will take a shot. CPU speed is in part determined by the clock. Faster clock, more data processed per second. That's the simplest understanding. Now for modern CPUs, we use a pipeline architecture. So just like how a compiler like LLVM has a tons of optimizations, the same can be said for CPUs. Your CPU doesn't quite execute instructions one by one like a hardware Turing machine. It consumes a large chunk of instructions, try to figure out what's needed and what's not, and then process it. This is all done the few pico seconds of each cycle. It's less like a car manufacturing line and more like a fruit sorting machine, different operations gets executed simultaneously if the processor can prove that they are not e.g. required to be in order. A CPU with more transistors can easily process more optimizations i.e. bigger pipeline. You can also throw in other stuff like caches to squeeze out even more performance. The other side of Moore's law is economics, essentially cost of computing gets halved, more processing power for half the cost. Same chip, more power. Now for CPUs, clock speed has pretty much plateaued in the last decade. It is increasing, but slowly. At the same time, there are limits to pipelining, and if you get too eager with optimizations, you end up introducing vulnerabilities (since this is HN, I think I don't need to cite examples, there have been plenty). We are approaching the limit of transistor scaling and the clock isn't magically oscillating faster so there is now greater urgency on the architecture side. Current software is unable to take full advantage of multi-core processors or parallelism to the extent of making Moore's law great again. (the last time Intel tried to launch a CPU with emphasis on parallelism didn't really work out, look up Itanium). It shifts a lot of work to the compiler end and makes life unnecessarily difficult for compiler authors.

Now GPUs are designed for running multiple computations simultaneously, like CPUs, there's the fact that most operations cannot be trivially parallized. Matrices and linear algebra can because of obvious reasons — large grid of numbers, easier to process at once than with a for-loop. Most problems are not like this. The next step for computing may be FPGAs, digital circuits that can be reconfigured on-the-fly. Certain new Intel CPUs have this and most processors have a basic version in the form of microcode. Whether this will work out, I do not know. FPGAs is too more compatible with trivially parallized tasks than your usual CPU based workload. Theoretically in future you can perhaps spend 20min compiling Minecraft or Factorio to FPGA bitcode during the installation process, though more likely it is only the processor intensive bits that gets optimized. When you load the game, part of the chip gets reconfigured for it. I believe this will benefit long running processes more than short ones.

Now I am no subject domain expert so somebody with more insider experience should elaborate on this.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who looked hard into it, RISC-V doesn't really make sense for a GPU shaders, IMO. You'd have to change so many things about how the ISA works that you wouldn't get a benefit to using a common ISA. Stuff like how shaders are batched and dispatched, textures accesses make sense to be their own instructions, you want a larger register file on the scalar side, the memory barrier semantics are much more complex…

Nvidia are supposed to be using RISC-V inside future GPUs.

Yes, as a replacement for their internal proprietary logic controllers which operate in the periphery.

That has nothing to do with the RISC-V ISA being the right choice for core functionality like shader cores.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#66

The problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or…

It's not clear to me that you can't make an open source cpu with a chip like risc-v

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#67
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Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#68
post #43
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. This would be a impediment typically, but considering they're blackballed already, how beholden are they to patents? Block imports? Think that's being done already. Requiring US companies to not do business with them? That's being done already. At this point, they just have to ride out the US/China trade war and then when thin…

You imply Huawei was playing by the "rules" and not already stealing. [1] [2] [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/us-indicts-huawe... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-st...

This seems disingenuous and arbitrary considering the decision to put Iran on a ban list was basically taken unilaterally by the US, all the while Cisco and Bluecoat were selling tech to build the great firewall of China, and a long list of other (US, Israeli, etc.) companies are selling tech to basically every authoritarian, oppressive regime out there without any legal or moral consequences.

As for Huawei, the fact that the bans and sanctions tend to be fluid and negotiable despite being called a national security issue kind of puts the "national" part into question. Someone certainly benefits.

And consider that the media does a great job in painting half of the picture. The other half is filled with the complete absence of articles related to US companies trying to steal secrets. The plausible explanation is that the media is heavily biased (in al honesty it's not like they could publish articles on active operations). In this context does it seem fair to judge having only half the information?

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#69

The problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or…

Huawei is still a largely a networking equipment company, the consumer branch of it is growing very fast, but not essential, as per their CEO.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#70
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Linux distro probably, at least initially.

Does Huawei sell Linux laptops today? Why not? Why would that change? If they don't think x86/Linux or ARM/Linux laptops are a good idea, why would RISC-V/Linux laptops be a good idea? People love to come up with fantasies and try to work backwards from them, but sometimes you really can't get there from here.

Is there a Windows version for RISC-V? Can they still legally use it? Do they want to dependent on Microsoft? I think these are questions that need an answer and I doubt that they are all answered affirmatively.
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