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Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
x86 is the past, but ARM is proprietary. RISC-V is the open source answer (there is SPARC but it's much older and never gained enough traction + Power/PowerPC became open source too but it's also not a modern ISA)
While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no interesting in a board, no matter how cheap, that will be stuck on some ancient, unmaintained kernel version. It looks like they're off to a good start but appearances can be deceiving. Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty n…
how much work/how long will it take before the kernel is not a fork/everything is upstreamed. 12 months? also, on my raspberry pi i at least stood a chance of running a headless chrome for some silly scrape job i had. RISC-V pretty much guarantees that's not the case, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For CPU developers it's permissionless. To develop a new Arm chip you need to negotiate a license up front from that company. To develop a new x86 chip, well, forget about that. Intel won't license x86 for any amount of money. For RISC-V, download a BSD-licensed core from github, or grab the BSD-licensed specs and write your own. No need to ask anyone's permission, and no fees to pay.
But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
Basically, all the same arguments you've heard in favor of open source in general. Today, board developers have to pay if they want to license ARM. And with recent developments coming out of ARM, the price to pay is going up by a lot, very soon. If RISC-V can develop to the point of more or less parity with ARM, then that will enable cheaper products that are just as good, equally priced products that are better, or…
More important is that more competition may lead to better designs and the RISC-V gives more freedom for firms to innovate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically, all the same arguments you've heard in favor of open source in general. Today, board developers have to pay if they want to license ARM. And with recent developments coming out of ARM, the price to pay is going up by a lot, very soon. If RISC-V can develop to the point of more or less parity with ARM, then that will enable cheaper products that are just as good, equally priced products that are better, or…
This emphasis on price is a bit misleading imho. Arm had revenues of less than $800m in the last reported quarter and there were 8 billion Arm cores shipped. So that’s less than 10c per core. And that’s not the fee for the ISA it’s the total cost of licensing the core. So if you’re expecting a big cost saving on the end user price from the ISA being open source then you’ll be likely to be disappointed. More important…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Somehow I doubt that they're much more friendly about it. At a technical level, though it's an interesting question; I'm actually pretty curious to know whether you could make a processor that's pure amd64 without the legacy 32-bit mode... I suspect it would be a fair bit of work from the software side to support that, but it's probably possible. But I'm no ISA designer:) Edit: Or is 32-bit x86 so old that you could…
While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no interesting in a board, no matter how cheap, that will be stuck on some ancient, unmaintained kernel version. It looks like they're off to a good start but appearances can be deceiving. Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty n…
how much work/how long will it take before the kernel is not a fork/everything is upstreamed. 12 months? also, on my raspberry pi i at least stood a chance of running a headless chrome for some silly scrape job i had. RISC-V pretty much guarantees that's not the case, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For CPU developers it's permissionless. To develop a new Arm chip you need to negotiate a license up front from that company. To develop a new x86 chip, well, forget about that. Intel won't license x86 for any amount of money. For RISC-V, download a BSD-licensed core from github, or grab the BSD-licensed specs and write your own. No need to ask anyone's permission, and no fees to pay.
But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This emphasis on price is a bit misleading imho. Arm had revenues of less than $800m in the last reported quarter and there were 8 billion Arm cores shipped. So that’s less than 10c per core. And that’s not the fee for the ISA it’s the total cost of licensing the core. So if you’re expecting a big cost saving on the end user price from the ISA being open source then you’ll be likely to be disappointed. More important…
10¢ is significant on the low end. This is where RISC-V will chip away at ARM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People get excited because "it's open source". Except it's really not as only the instruction set is "open source" and even that doesn't really mean much as interfaces have dubious copyright protection. Still, it promises a cheaper alternative to ARM because of the theoretical reduced licensing costs from the trademark name. The other salient is political: ARM, x86, etc are Western aligned while RISC-V is attractivel…
I don't care about licensing costs just the final total cost. And I absolutely don't care that it is "politically nonaligned", bah. I care because David Patterson is a badass who was right about everything. :)
You don't until you do. Like all the corps which need to replace the Huawei tech unexpectedly.