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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”

#221

Post by LeFantome »

andai wrote: post #146
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…

Interesting. So I've seen a lot of reviews of RISC-V machines and they seem to be a decade or more behind in terms of performance. I always thought that was a case of "the tech is still catching up",[0] but it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations? If so... I heard China was investing heavily in RISC-V, which implies that either they're going to have to settle for permanentl…

> China was investing heavily in RISC-V, which implies that either they're going to have to settle for permanently crippled perf

Not quite. RISC-V application class processors are a new development. They are starting from behind but they are improving faster than the competition. The SpacemiT K3 is 4 times faster than the K1 for example. The Alibaba C950 will be about Apple M1 level performance. And even faster designs are already in the works.

RISC-V is not “permenantly crippled”. It will catch up and maybe surpass ARM. It is more an economy of scale issue than anything.

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

#222

Post by alightsoul »

alightsoul wrote: post #137

High shipping costs are the reason why many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America usually have freight forwarders They locally market themselves as package lockers, po boxes or online shopping companies. It turns out the expensive shipping cost doesn't scale linearly with package size or weight. The expensive shipping cost is a base price, and only rises slowly with package weight and size. So, these freight f…

Also, having a few freight forwarders keeps prices low via economies of scale. Each bag can be shared among many package lockers. Also, there is no working government run system for home addresses that are tied to individual homes like in the US, so the package locker takes on the responsibility, and liability, of making sure the package arrives at a predictable place.

Without package lockers which is what temu does, you have to coordinate in real time the delivery. Delivery is done during working hours. Not all people have free time to do this because hey are often at work so this results in a high delivery failure rate of 30 percent and logistics companies keep houses and warehouses full of undelivered packages.

And if the user complains because the package could not be delivered near their house, the logistics company assumes a penalty from temu and the user is granted a refund, and they can often pick up the package afterwards.

And taobao has a smaller local market relative to Amazon or other American ecommerce sites because it's in Chinese only and also due to that, Chinese package lockers are rare. However taobao is very cheap even cheaper than temu. Some small businesses buy in bulk from taobao for that reason to resell locally at twice the original sales+shipping price or more. Amazon is by far the most popular e-commerce site in Panama, so much so that yc backed local startups such as cuanto only specialize in artisanal and boutique items like Etsy does.

And of course the LLC is owned by the freight forwarder as a subsidiary or is the freight forwarder's parent company.

Btw, a popular business saying in Panama is that you should always sell at least twice the original purchase price.

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

#223

Post by LeFantome »

sylware wrote: post #206
LeFantome wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SiFive P870 and Tenstorrent Ascalon are pretty much Zen 3. Tenstorrent is supposed to be releasing silicon soon. You can license their cores now. SiFive says customers have the P870 already but I am not sure who those are.

Are they on the latest silicon process? Because, without neglecting the micro-architecture, we all know how critical the silicon process is for high-end performance.

The first Ascalon silicon, Atlantis, will not be the latest process. As you say, that will impact performance. But there are plans for other chips to use newer process, and of course you can license and do what you like.

The point is that RISC-V is not limited to lower performance by the ISA.

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

#224

Post by LeFantome »

muyuu wrote: post #160
andai wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So I've seen a lot of reviews of RISC-V machines and they seem to be a decade or more behind in terms of performance. I always thought that was a case of "the tech is still catching up",[0] but it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations? If so... I heard China was investing heavily in RISC-V, which implies that either they're going to have to settle for permanentl…

the main problem with RISC-V is also the main selling point: there is no single owner company behind steering development and making sweeping decisions how will that pan out over the long term is really unclear and the reality is performance is actually catching up quickly

History tells us that open standards pretty much always beat out proprietary ones in the end.

You cannot buy the company backing RISC-V to take out the competition. And if a RISC-V company stumbles, the ecosystem carries on. But if even one RISC-V company is in the right place at the right time, RISC-V can surge ahead. It is hard to imagine it does not dominate eventually.

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

#225

Post by snowpid »

alephnerd wrote: post #218
Avicebron wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN For starters, most Bay Area residents are not active on HN on a sunny Sunday afternoon during peak brunch time, a Giants v Rockies game, a social race in the Marina, during the weekend right before college move-in begins for a number of UCs, and the first weekend after the K-12 school year started. Secondly, the technical con…

Pickleball and Hyrox is very common in the DACH region, Hyrox was invented in Hamburg...

" Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. " Non existent in DACH region or CEE because why should it?

" Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure." I think people with problems are more likely to post and secondly maybe you are convoluting your social circle with the whole SV.

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

#226

Post by Johanx64 »

jiqiren wrote: post #119
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…

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…

> When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free.

China has amazing prices for genuine electronics components from every manufacturer. Including stm32, NXP as well as local arm32 licensees gd32,hk32,XHSC. From which you can buy Cortex-M0+ down to 10-20cents per piece.

Literally anything you can buy in the West, you get for fraction of the price in China, even in small volumes.

If you live in the third world you wouldn't even think about ordering from "western parts supplier", everything is expensive and overpriced and selection is shit (compared to China).

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

#227

Post by phire »

rasz wrote: post #220
kreelman wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the CH32v003, https://github.com/openwch/ch32v003 These are pretty low end and are fairly available at low cost. Here's a youtube of someone talking through some of the the CH32 boards, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kss6WQvJbRs He talks about them being the "10c/chip" chip. Then, there is the CH32v303 https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V303.html , which is the lower end of the chips that support minimal flo…

CH32v303 costs more than much more capable ARM based RP2354A

And on the RP2354 you can swap one or both ARM cores for RISC-V cores at boot.

I think the CH32v303's single V4F core might be slightly more capable than the Hazard 3 cores RISC-V cores (as it has a hardware FPU), but for everything else the RP2354 is probably better (and the ARM cores do have hardware FPUs)

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

#229

Post by germandiago »

I find the headline a lot about the "who".

It sounds like trying to remove authority from the person that criticized it, but I think it is a good idea to focus on the arguments, and not on the ad-hoc assessments and conclude from there whether they are valid or not.

I will read it later, no time now. Thanks for the link anyways.

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

#230

Post by hn_submit »

Grinberg's article is highly technical and compares RISC-V to other ISAs like MIPS, x86 and ARM. This article is more about the freedom RISC-V offers, both in licensing, availability, flexibility and cost.

RISC-V has put enormous pricing pressure on manufacturers like MicroChip, which is now offering its AVR line of 8-bit MCUs for pennies a piece. Too bad that the 32-bit RISC-V offerings from, among others, WCH are far more powerful at a similar price point.

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