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So “you were born somewhere ‘unlucky’, that’s how it goes, sucks to be you”. Is that really your take?
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A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
61–70 of 350 posts
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#62I have no idea what's going on here, but the title alone gave me second-hand engineering stress. Solid post.
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#63"Now price the same journey on the other side, forget x86-64 and that duopoly, patent minefield, with multi-thousand dollar debug probes; we'll take a look at ARM." The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them…
There are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.
Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about
Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/
Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens... (Caveat: The startup is acquainted with the Intel CEO, so it's rare for them to grant the x86 license to non-buddies.)
"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."
What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#64Working archived copy - https://archive.is/9FaRC
Is archive.is still a malicious site that DDOS's finnish security bloggers or has that been sorted?
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#65I love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue: > The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile deliver…
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#66I think he's kind of speaking past the original author. The original piece is basically about how the author doesn't think that RISC-V will take off outside embedded, because of some design decisions that lead to poor performance compared to ARM64 and because so much of the ISA being optional means that there's too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible. Meanwhile, this piece is mainly about how RISC-V is great for embedded because companies can build it into custom chips with specifically the functionality they need, and because of how cheap it is for low-end use cases since there's no license fees.
The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#67He says:
> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings
Yet earlier:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#68To me it feels like the difference in positions is "this could be made better" vs. "but this is already so much better than before". Both are right. Maybe I'm missing something important so far...
I was thinking the same. RISC-V is certainly impressive and I'm glad we have it, but the original article isn't wrong in its complaints either.
It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.
Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#69Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a bay area centric take on a non bay area centric take. The typical bay area centric take has the following vibe: 1. I am among the group of most open minded people 2. I admit mistakes, but I don't change my view, that means I may make the same mistakes next time on a different concrete cases 3. Morally I am among the least corrupted 4. I work for the moderately morally questionable firms with nice paychecks,…
As exemplified in the following series of essays https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-h...
This one was more self-aware than others. But we all know the demon voice of San Francisco sounds like a shoggoth trained on LessWrong.