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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”

#121

Post by BirAdam »

initramfs wrote: post #51

"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’s Vortex86 and VIA. VIA’s rights came from Cyrix, and this is where Zhaoxin‘s rights come from.

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

#122

Post by InsideOutSanta »

vlovich123 wrote: post #67

He 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 round…

He explains the difference here:

> I can pick up H417s on the official WCH store on Aliexpress with free shipping and no verification hullabalu.

I think the point is that anyone can make these chips, so there are Chinese sellers who just throw them in a padded envelope and send them out without bothering with all the stuff "serious" vendors do. And because they're cheap enough, if doesn't matter if some get lost in the mail.

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

#123

Post by phire »

ndiddy wrote: 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…

The two authors also have a very different definition of what "high-end" means.

Dmitry is talking about high-end application processors that you might find in a mid-range or better laptop, smartphone or server. Armstrong Subero seems to think that anything larger than a "dirt cheap microcontroller" is high-end.

People shouldn't take this the wrong way, but the VexRISC-V cores in Baochip are not "high-end". They are basically as low-end as you can get while still meeting the modern definition of "application core". And that doesn't matter, because being high-end application SoC is not Baochip's design criteria. These cores are actually pretty decent for Baochip's criteria.

The VexRISC-V are implementing the exact style of "classic-RISC" microarchitecture that RISC-V is optimised for. It's basically the optimal niche for RISC-V, before any of the problems start showing up.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone express the opinion that RISC-V can't easily cover the "dirt cheap microcontroller" to "low-end application processor" range, even stretching up into "mid-range application processor". Just that it's really fighting an uphill battle if it ever wants to compete with high-end application processors (and that it's going to struggle in the low-range/mid-range application market because of that).

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

#124

Post by 999900000999 »

>He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists.

>This is almost satirical.

That's all that needs to be said.

It's like comparing Unity and Godot. Unity is better in every single way but one, you have to license it from a very poorly ran company.

You don't "own" your games, they ship with black box spyware. The pricing for using it can change from day to day.

I swear the Unity C level employs a Magic 8 Ball and consults it for key management decisions.

If you need to edit the Unity Engine source code your looking at a secret additional licensing fee which is certainly unaffordable for hobbyist and most indies.

Vs Godot which is completely free under the MIT license.

Everything about the above can be said for ARM as well.

RISC-V is free for everyone to play with. If you think it sucks you can always fork it and jerryrig it to work on existing hardware.

If you have money you can even get custom hardware for your forked RISC-V.

I very much enjoyed reading this article, I'm optimistic in seeing what OPs students come up with. This is life changing technology that's essentially available to all.

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

#125

Post by initramfs »

BirAdam wrote: post #121
initramfs wrote: post #51

"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’s Vortex86 and VIA. VIA’s rights came from Cyrix, and this is where Zhaoxin‘s rights come from.

Thanks for supplying the chain of licensure!

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

#126

Post by armstrongsubero »

cupantae wrote: post #84
vlovich123 wrote: post #67

He 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 round…

I’d really like an explanation here if the author is reading. And how does shipping cost scale with quantity? Can you get that to be small per unit on big orders?

Hi there, shipping has a floor and then it scales, but it scales far slower than the order does.... so if you buy like one resistor from DigiKey or Mouser, that starts around $60, a hundred resistors costs about the same if you add chips and weight and it climbs from there, but $60 is the floor no matter how small the order....

So per unit shipping collapses with quantity, which is why the part price matters more here, not less. The fixed cost forces you to buy deep, and only the cheap part lets you buy deep. At a dollar a part, 1000 units is a $1060 order nobody here is placing... at ten cents it is $160, and then there are 1000 parts sitting in Trinidad that nobody else has to pay $60 to reach, so you can have enough for a small product run..keep in mind we also currently have US dollar shortage, so you only get allocated a certain amount of US per quarter....

I should also have been explicit that those figures are the Western channels like DigiKey, Mouser, courier from LCSC. WCH officially sells direct on AliExpress with free shipping, which runs on postal consolidation rates that do not price by how remote you are. But that channel is a game of chance. Sometimes things just never come, there is no ARM equivalent either. I cannot buy an STM32 from ST with free shipping to Trinidad, and I cannot trust the aftermarket parts because some of them are fakes, and some vendors do not have this country in their shipping list at all....

The part I care about most is that at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. Learning embedded means killing chips, and at a dollar a part a teacher flinches, cause 1 US dollar is about 7 dollars here, and starts supervising instead of letting people find out. And the same goes for me, at ten cents I can experiment and still ship with the part I experimented on....

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

#127

Post by kelnos »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #122
vlovich123 wrote: post #67

He 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 round…

He explains the difference here: > I can pick up H417s on the official WCH store on Aliexpress with free shipping and no verification hullabalu. I think the point is that anyone can make these chips, so there are Chinese sellers who just throw them in a padded envelope and send them out without bothering with all the stuff "serious" vendors do. And because they're cheap enough, if doesn't matter if some get lost in t…

Sure, but a quick search of AliExpress shows that you can get lots of ARM chips from them too, and I assume those are without any "verification hullabalu" as well, no?

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

#128

Post by rvba »

kelnos wrote: 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…

In addition to what you wrote... what does China use? One could argue that the factories there have very low cost of shipping + economies of scale - they order thousands of units, if not tens of thousands.

Then probably RISC-V being "open" license is the key to its success, even if the architecture itself is weird.

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

#129

Post by philipportner »

camel-cdr wrote: post #108
pixelesque wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really crazy optimizations that they are doing Any examples of this?

Here are a few random things I know of: * Tenstorrent Ascalon has a neat optimization for certain LMUL>1 SIMD operations. LMUL=2 effectively unrolls the SIMD operation making it read two SIMD registers from every source and write two SIMD registers to the destination. There are however some instructions where LMUL=2 only needs to write to one registers, those are narrowing instructions (e.g. 64-bit to 32-bit truncati…

How do you keep up with such information? Any sources you could recommend? Closest I know would be SemiAnalysis

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

#130

Post by logdahl »

egypturnash wrote: post #100

Rate Limit Exceeded Too Many Requests You have exceeded the allowed number of requests. Your Requests: 500. Request Limit: 500 per minute. Tip: Please wait 60 seconds before trying again. A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Learns About Caching Generated HTML The Hard Way. https://archive.md/9FaRC

I haven't seen this before, but this ReCAPTCHA required "mobile verification" from me, and asked me to download an app. Oh what a world we live in...
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