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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”

#111
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-American here... what is DACH?

Germany, Austria, Switzerland (D, A, CH)

D, A and CH are the international vehicle registration codes for those countries among other things. and "dach" as a word means "roof", which makes it memorable. some more fun facts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...

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

#112

More than half the article is AI slop. Sad.

A fun fact about ChatGPT and its ilk is the final RL polishing of the responses was outsourced to Nigeria and other places with cheap labor, so the patterns you’re picking up in the article aren’t that the author sounds like ChatGPT, it’s that ChatGPT sounds like the author.

Same reason the southern accent has overlaps with west African dialects.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they are necessarily asserting otherwise

Shipping from Asia to Asia doesn’t make much sense

Hey, Asia’s not that big. If you’re in Bangladesh, you can simply walk to the electronics store in Japan.

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

#114

My perspective using Nix is that it's hardly worth standardizing ISAs. Recompiling software is easy and we should have a Cambrian explosion of different designs. This is especially good if one scopes out a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA.

An explosion of ISAs means the available talent for writing optimizing compilers will be stretched much more thinly. Unpopular ISAs will have slow, buggy codegen, and the popular ones will suffer somewhat, too.

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

#115
post #66

I 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…

Different RISC-V dialects might as well be as different from each other as English is from German. Sure, the cognates, family the resemblance, and common(-ish) alphabet make some things easier, but if you're shipping a manual, you still need to do it both in English and auf Deutsch unless you rely on machine translation. So it is with the family of mutually incomprehensible ISAs called RISC-V.

Yeah I know this mess in PowerPC. There is IBM Power, there is MPC5xx ISA, there is VLE and and several other dialects. Some processors are doing those some doing others, some needs bit to signal if program runs VLE... just crazy chaos.

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

#116
post #36

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, 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

People from South Asia are not "aka Indians". There are other countries.

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH. The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of comma…

How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN?

Haven't seen anyone sending partiful invites here.

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

#118

"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 were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.

To do that they, at least, should still exist. For most of them this is not the case.

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

#119
post #102

I don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part". I don't get how both things can be…

He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.

Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.

The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.

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

#120
post #102

I don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part". I don't get how both things can be…

He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion. Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument m…

Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.

A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.

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