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

tomshardware.com

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

#71

Post by TomVDB »

mmanfrin wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs have sort of plateaued except for the raytracing component. There are quite a few vendors, Mali from ARM, Adreno from Qualcomm, PowerVR from Imagination, NVIDIA's GeForce, AMD's Radeon, Intel's integrated stuff, and then there is a few more smaller players (what Matrox, Broadcom, etc.) I think there is room for an open source straightforward GPU based on the standard principles. Although maybe there is patent li…

> GPUs have sort of plateaued except for the raytracing component What? As far as I understood it, CPUs had plateaued outside of efficiencies, GPU power still follows Moore's. Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, whereas CPUs from 7 or 8 years ago are only marginally slower (SC) than modern ones.

Number of transistors/$ is about to reach a plateau soon (if it hasn’t already.)

More powerful GPUs will happen as Moore’s Law continues for a few more years, but the free for all will soon be over.

This is true for the whole semiconductor industry, and the consequences will be very interesting, not necessarily in a good way.

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

#72

Post by ArnoVW »

zsrxx wrote: post #49
ksec wrote: 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.

Why can't a GPU power a computer?

Same reason we have OLAP and OLTP systems. Same reason it makes sense for some use cases to set up a Hadoop cluster, and for others to have a single but fast CPU: some tasks can be run in parallel, others can't.

See Amdahl's law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

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

#73

Post by microcolonel »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

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…

Nothing about RISC-V would cause any more difficulty interfacing with GPUs. Any GPU you can license piecemeal right now, can also be connected to a RISC-V complex.

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

#74

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

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…

There is an okish Chinese GPU maker. We'll have to see if they actually deliver though. But with more funding they may be competitive.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/297099-chinese-vendor-...

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

#75

Post by monocasa »

rjsw wrote: post #56
monocasa wrote: post #48

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.

To replace their falcon cores in the places I talked about in my second paragraph.

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

#76

Post by superkuh »

atdrummond wrote: post #36
kinghajj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BOOM is close to Ivy Bridge IPC in one benchmark. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~celio/

Using MHz as a divisor really benefits BOOM and extrapolating from IPC makes some assumptions regarding the future ability of the chip to scale to similar frequencies as Intel's product line. Assuming the best performing BOOM chip refers to the 2018 HotChips tapeout, that chip operated at 1.0 GHz. The lowest speed Ivy Bridge Core/Pentium (a design getting close to a decade old, FWIW) was 2.5 GHz. This means on a core…

>Today's 9900K is also around 40% more performant than the comparable Ivy Bridge (4960X).

Most of that relative performance gain is not from increased speed but from decreased speed of older processors due to meltdown (and spectre) mitigations. In the past the 4960X and it's contemporaries were much faster.

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

#77

Post by gumby »

What do they expect. The US tariff wall and embargo is essentially a subsidy that encourages local development. Without it it’s cheaper to continue to depend on US controlled designs. Essentially low tariffs make it hard for local industries to get themselves above the price floor.

These parts aren’t much to get excited abOUT today but they’ve finally given China a reason to subsidize local efforts, resulting in the long term with an ecosystem that can take off the us design giants.

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

#78

Post by flmontpetit »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #37
FullyFunctional wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software. There's tremendous inertia in apps which is what gave x86 an effective monopoly in the 90'es, even when superior options were available (hello Alpha). Today the situation is actually better and with RISC-V having the same memory model as Arm, porting from an Arm version is way easier (Neon code not withstanding) but it's obviously way less attractive than running running existing code.

So QWERTY keyboards all over again, basically.

"Literally every software and hardware market since computers became a commodity" all over again, you mean. They've always tended towards monopolies.

IP law is harmful to society.

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

#79

Post by bogwog »

cmiles74 wrote: post #7
jimmaswell wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we want RISC-V on laptops?

Maybe it won't contain a vendor "management engine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...

If the RISC-V chips are manufactured in China, then they'll probably contain something worse than Intel ME.

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

#80

Post by flmontpetit »

Taniwha wrote: post #8
bhouston wrote: post #6

I think that RISC-V has a long way to go to be actually competitive with ARM on a IPC basis. Although it is great to have more competition in the market I believe that this is more of a 5-10 year goal rather than distinctly near term.

RISC-V is an instruction set - I think you're confusing that particular implementations of RISC-V (of which there are few yet)

If you properly examine the context then you can do like most and interpret "ARM" as "current mainstream ARM implementations".
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