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A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

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Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York. In my experience, the only demographic who complains about “Asia = east Asia” are people from South Asia, aka Indians/desis

We aren't the only ones, but we are the loudest about it, because erasure sucks.

Don't get me started about Macedonia.

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#72
I don't think the Author disagree with what the original article wrote. If anything everything he said seems to reassert what the original article intended to state.

And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line.

"You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#73
post #4

I 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 could be bureocratic barriers. For example, Turkey recently changed importing laws so that anything(even stuff sent to you for free) from outside the country is subject to tariffs & import costs. Importing a cheap component worth 1$ costs like 300$.

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#75

[flagged]

Naïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.

Appeals to an ethical basis don't work on everyone

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.

Appeals to an ethical basis don't work on everyone

Let’s take the rationalist approach, then: does the author of this blog post seem like someone who could contribute reasonably to humanity’s future? Does it seem like we might be doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring them, and those like them?

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

― Stephen Jay Gould

Edit: y’all really don’t like being told you should care about other people, huh?

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#77
This blog post is very defensive and argumentative, which I guess is fair considering Dmitry's post is similarly inflammatory, but most of it was really not convincing:

> Simply put, the things a high-end CPU needs are diametrically opposed to the things a small cost-saving microcontroller core needs.

> The conclusion he draws is that no single ISA can serve both ends, and that RISC-V fans are fooling themselves, in theory the premise is true. The conclusion does not follow, and I can show you why from three parts sitting on my desk as we speak.

> CH32V003. This is the cheap "RV32EC" with sixteen registers, no multiplier, no divider, machine mode only,

> CH32H417. A dual core MCU that is unmatched in performance to price point and is at the higher end of the MCU line

> Baochip. A VexRISC-V with an MMU built around a stack thats open from silicon to os Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC for High Assurance Applications

Uh, which one of these is a datacenter server cpu? Or a workstation cpu? Or at least a developer laptop cpu? How about a Raspberry Pi 4 level SBC (supporting latest ubuntu and fedora releases, driving a display that runs a browser and plays video ...)

There's a lot of angry indignation but it seems obvious that Dmitry is quite right about this.

But I found this is where this blog post starts making a lot of sense:

> Has anyone tried adding an MMU to a Cortex-M? The physical tradeoffs are real, the difference is that with RISC-V, the ISA owner does not decide for you where that boundary must be drawn. If you want virtual memory on ARM you license a Cortex-A instead, which is a different core family, a different profile, a different negotiation, and a different royalty.

> Compare what happened with Baochip. The RISC-V privileged specification defines supervisor mode and Sv32 paging as optional things an implementation may provide. VexRISC-V is an open core, somebody added an MMU to it. bunnie built a chip around it and runs a microkernel with real process isolation on it

Yeah, that is a good point. We're still in the low-end specialty realm, but that is real interesting advantage for RISC-V, a good reason for it to exist.

As for shipping to Trinidad and Tobago ... this post is trying too hard to turn this into moral issue, but it seems a bit random (OrangePi cost $30 and shipped free? you can also get arm-based and stuff from the same places), and the vast majority of people don't live on semi-remote islands, it doesn't make sense to consider this kind of accessibility above all else, and it's strange to blame Dmitry for not thinking of you here.

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#78
post #4

I 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…

> from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country in Asia...

So is Ireland.

Re: A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

#80
yo this is actually some really fire reading. i had to read it twice then go back and read the original that he's responding to here. i feel full of wonder right now seeing people who are this deep into compsci debating merits in the marketplace of ideas, there's just so much going on globally with computing that i never even get to see. super fascinating to read about the different constraints at play here even the global socioeconomic ones and how they apply to the chip world in general. it sounds like risc-v's real play is democratizing access to the entire embedded stack
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