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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

#131

Post by fulafel »

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…

From hardware POV GPUs these days are to a close approximation just multicore CPUs with more focus on parallel throughput instead of single core performence, and a few specialized graphics op instructions (like texture lookup) that are unlikely to be badly patent encumbered due to their age.

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

#132

Post by AFascistWorld »

mappu wrote: post #115
axaxs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.

SMIC are now rolling out 14nm - that's apparently competitive enough for people to still use Intel CPUs.

They've been rolling it out since 2016, better wait until their product actually appears.

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

#133

Post by glangdale »

kinghajj wrote: post #52
atdrummond wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IPC means "instructions per cycle," so it's correct to divide the scores by frequency. Totally agree that in total performance, no realized BOOM chip comes close to mainstream Intel chips. I think Chris is working at Esperanto Technologies ( https://www.esperanto.ai/technology/); hopefully, they upstream performance improvements to the BOOM open-source repo.

It's a bit more nuanced than that. It's a lot easier design-wise to hit a given IPC at 1.0GHz than it is to hit the same IPC at 4.0GHz.

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

#134

Post by AFascistWorld »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #74
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-...

>Military ties, Chinese listed company

That how you know it's nothing but a marketing campaign to boost their stock price.

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

#135

Post by mycall »

hermitdev wrote: post #130
Retric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest issue is lack of huge caches, and the extreme latency to main memory due to the speed of light. GPU’s are fine or even better for a wide range of compute tasks see CUDA etc, they just end up being very slow at a subset of common tasks.

Circuits don't operate at speed of light, though. People like to say this over and over again, but electron mobility through a circuit is only around 2/3s the speed of light, IIRC. They may have very tiny mass, but they still have mass.

It is the mass in the electrons that creates the heat.

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

#136

Post by camillomiller »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #69
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…

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.

I was in Beijing at their press conf last January when Richard Yu proudly announced that in 2018 the Consumer Business Group had a record revenue of fifty billion US$, making as much as the infrastructure division for the first time ever. Sure Ren Zhengfei is ready to throw the CBG under the bus if needed (but it won’t happen, as it is sustainable even as a China-only business). Still the consumer division is way past being just a small part of the company.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #124
madez wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something without an management engine would certainly possible, but would be limited to niche products like the librem. I don't share this forecast. I think many private customers would view a machine without the ME and it's capabilities as a plus for a product when the marketing is done right. Especially since most don't care for the capabilities.

>I don't share this forecast. I think many private customers would view a machine without the ME and it's capabilities as a plus for a product when the marketing is done right A lot of people say they value privacy, but when push comes to shove, they'll willingly trade privacy for convenience and cost. See: any facebook/instagram user, or iOS users who use google maps. iOS/Mac is marketed as the private phone/compute…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by FullyFunctional »

microcolonel wrote: post #128
FullyFunctional wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why there would be _any_ porting involved. Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. The major pain points today are the JITs, which applies to Java and JavaScript in particular. There has been preciously little (public) progress on these.

It's a lot of work, and I don't know that there's any support for the effort to port V8 and ART to RISC-V. When I was starting on V8 port, I didn't see much in terms of interest in providing material support for it. I got one interview out of it, but I feel like maybe the Foundation is the right place for that. They'd have to delegate the hiring and management to a member, but I think it could work. Huawei has their…

Absolutely, giants like Google or Huawei could pull this off, I really don't know if we'll see Java without someone like that. Personally I'm keen to see Mozilla's JavaScript VM (is it still called SpikerMonkey?) ported, but I doubt it will happen until we see more widely available/affordable RISC-V hardware.

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

#139

Post by deepnotderp »

mappu wrote: post #115
axaxs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>are there foundaries in China that can produce the chips necessary while ignoring foreign patents? Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.

SMIC are now rolling out 14nm - that's apparently competitive enough for people to still use Intel CPUs.

There's a very, very big difference between "rolling out 14nm" with unknown yields, performance, etc. Vs Intel's venerable 14nm process.

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

#140

Post by FullyFunctional »

kllrnohj wrote: post #96
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.

> 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) It's really not any different today than it was. The memory model being similar is kinda nice, but you still need to convince the world to compile for another arch. And you need to make a CPU good enough to justify the recompile and ongoing multi-arch mai…

IMO it's hugely different, at least in the server space. In the 90'es _all_ servers ran on proprietary platforms (OSes and micro-architectures). To succeed with an alternative, you had to convince your OS vendor (Microsoft, Sun, ...) to port. The most famous attempt Windows NT (ran on x86, PowerPC, Alpha, and possibly more), but the effort fizzled.

Today, the MAJORITY of servers run Linux, even on Microsoft cloud platform, and a significant part of that is using primarily open source (eg. "LAMP"). If, say, RHEL supports your platform, it's fairly easy for most to move.

Yes, it's not easy to migrate, but it is _way_ easier than it used to be. Now, non-server application is a different story.

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