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.
Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
61–70 of 162 posts
Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#62Earlier 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?
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
#63Whenever I hear the horrors of the tradewar in a positive light, I wonder if this is the Russian propagandists in action. How can war be good? Delighting in the suffering of everyone?
Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#64Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#65Earlier 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.
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
#66The 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…
Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#67Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#68Earlier 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...
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
#69The 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…
Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips
#70Earlier 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.