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But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Historically, Intel and AMD had an exclusive IP sharing agreement with each other. That would not extend to other parties.
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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…
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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)
What makes an ISA "modern" and why are ISAs that aren't, bad per se?
They may have memory models that make guarantees that are insignificantly secure or impede optimisation.
There is something about condition codes vs explicit checks that made speculative execution difficult. I don't recall the details about this one.
I really like Pine64, this is really nice to see! The coolest part IMHO is they are including an PCIe x1 slot, right on the board. I feel like RISC V has really started to pick up momentum over the last year or two, which is awesome to see. There have also been a bunch of tiny RISC V softcores for FPGAs too.
They list an NVMe SSD adapter board with PCIe x4, I wonder if that works together and can be booted from? I know with my RPi getting away from SD card boot made a huge difference.
Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
On a more general level, the idea of RISC is to have a very very simple instruction set instead of a thousand 'clever' features that are mostly underused, so that you can optimize your software project out the yin-yang if you're more concerned with pure performance than versatility.
Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
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.
Since most of us don't design CPUs or micros, does it matter much whether it's RISC-V vs ARM? In other words, is there any way to contribute in the RISC-V space and gain an advantage? I can see how it could work out for Intel or Nvidia but for an end-user I can't see how I would jump away from the architecture I've spent the last 10 years on.
However, what does matter is that the RISC-V ISA will be cheaper and more flexible for device manufacturers to use. That's why it's superior to ARM and has already partly supplanted it for smaller chips (there are over 1 billion RISC-V chips in use already).
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what about AMD? wasn't it gaining traction?
AMD uses x86.
Since most of us don't design CPUs or micros, does it matter much whether it's RISC-V vs ARM? In other words, is there any way to contribute in the RISC-V space and gain an advantage? I can see how it could work out for Intel or Nvidia but for an end-user I can't see how I would jump away from the architecture I've spent the last 10 years on.
* if you want to support the development of RISC-V as an alternative to x86 Arm /have some preference for not supporting x86 or Arm.
* if you are writing code generators, you may find RISC-V easier to generate code for.
If you don't care about these, then I would agree, keep using what works best for you.
So this is the same SoC as the Vision Five 2?