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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”

#261

Post by crote »

hakfoo wrote: post #233
rasz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CH32v303 costs more than much more capable ARM based RP2354A

I feel like the Raspberry Pi products are inherently a special case. They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. You've got a huge ready market in hobbyist/educational products as well as the commercial products that have used it as a convenient choice. There's that whole non-profit/educational heritage around them that likely selects for a different set of defaults…

> They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips.

I highly doubt it. The RP2xxx lacks the built-in functionality for use in, say, a car, and it isn't cheap and fully-integrated enough for dime-a-dozen gadget application. They are great for hobbyists due to their low barrier to entry, but there really isn't a niche they serve when it comes to mass-produced electronics.

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

#262

Post by crote »

dmitrygr wrote: post #192
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…

With enough effort, you can make a brick fly. X86 proves this. But if you are designing a new flying device, despite the fact that you could make a brick fly, you probably don’t want to design a brick. Why make it harder on yourself? Riscv took all this information in, and designed a very, very good brick.

When everyone is trying to make bricks fly, having the most aerodynamic brick probably isn't a bad thing.

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

#263

Post by sharpshadow »

phire wrote: post #182
simcop2387 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main roadblock to the existence of fast RISC-V cores is the entrenchment of large x86 and arm ecosystems. I'd disagree with that, their existence and decades of a head start mean they've been much more well invested but that's one of the things we're starting to see change, even if it's because of what would appear to be political motivations. We're starting to see a lot of investment into it in China because i…

You aren't disagreeing with the existence of the roadblock, just how hard it is to overcome. And yes, there is a bunch of funding being pumped into it. I do have hope that some kind of RISC-V linux workstation will be viable in the next 5 years, without sacrificing too much performance or my wallet. I just wouldn't expect that to translate into making inroads into existing markets where x86 and arm have moats, like a…

The XuanTie C950 looks pretty beefy for a RISC-V chip with integrated TPE. But it isn’t available commercially. They are moving fast in China, wouldn’t be surprised if they offer a breaking integrated solution in the near future. There aren’t any benchmarks available for the C950 but the comparisons go towards early Apple M-Series performance.

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

#264

Post by crote »

kelnos wrote: post #120
jiqiren wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results

Most of those are going to either be fake, or a clone with all kinds of weird compatibility issues. You might even get recycled chips, scavenged from e-waste.

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

#265

Post by a022311 »

One man's trash is another man's treasure. The mistake is being absolute and ignoring this fact.

This post reminded me of Engineering for Slow Internet (https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet), another case where careless assumptions by better-off people can have a huge impact on others.

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

#266

Post by ben-schaaf »

LeFantome wrote: post #197
acutelittlebox wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the current highest performance RISC-V systems you can buy off a shelf are equivalent to a raspberry pi 5 so they're not terribly behind. in terms of IPC, currently available RISC-V cores are already basically on par with Zen 3 and Apple M1 from what i understand and Jim Keller believes that RISC-V will be the one that leads the way for raw performance.

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.

I've seen this claimed before, and just going by SiFive's specint claims the P870 at 2.6GHz should match Zen 3.

But for SiFive's last silicon, the HiFive Premier P550, they claimed a specint2006 of 8.65/GHz. That should put the silicon only about 20% slower than an intel i5-6400. But if you look at geekbench scores it's about an order of magnitude slower.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Tenstorrent has yet to ship any of their own cores? They do make very similar claims to SiFive.

Personally I'm very skeptical that these cores will be anywhere near Zen 3. I recon their performance claims are based on best-case CPU simulation, rather than a real measurement. I'd expect Raspberry Pi 4 levels of performance, a bit over double SiFive's current state of the art. An impressive improvement, but nowhere near Zen 3.

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

#267

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

phire wrote: post #200
LeFantome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you got “freedom with $$”, there would have been no ARM/Qualcomm lawsuit.

Softbank and ARM managed to burn a lot of good-will with that bullshit (it is a bad sign when I'm siding with Qualcomm), and all for nothing as they lost that lawsuit. But is generally true that the $$ buys architecture licensees quite a bit of freedom. Not as much freedom as they would get with something open like RISC-V, as ARM have strict rules around private ISA extensions (like how Apple doesn't publicly documen…

The really big problem is that $$ don't buy freedom, they buy freedom for your lawyers to talk with ARM's lawyers about what features you are allowed to build.

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

#268

Post by lawyersuni »

phire wrote: post #200
LeFantome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you got “freedom with $$”, there would have been no ARM/Qualcomm lawsuit.

Softbank and ARM managed to burn a lot of good-will with that bullshit (it is a bad sign when I'm siding with Qualcomm), and all for nothing as they lost that lawsuit. But is generally true that the $$ buys architecture licensees quite a bit of freedom. Not as much freedom as they would get with something open like RISC-V, as ARM have strict rules around private ISA extensions (like how Apple doesn't publicly documen…

[flagged]

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

#269

Post by leoedin »

crote wrote: post #264
kelnos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results Most of those are going to either be fake, or a clone with all kinds of weird compatibility issues. You might even get recycled chips, scavenged from e-waste.

You can buy STM32s from LCSC (Chinese equivalent of Digikey). They're probably not fake - LCSC is a fairly established trusted manufacturer.

China makes a huge majority of the world's electronics, and a big chunk of those will have ARM microcontrollers on them. Of course Chinese suppliers can get genuine ARM chips.

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

#270

Post by ajsnigrutin »

crote wrote: post #261
hakfoo wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the Raspberry Pi products are inherently a special case. They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. You've got a huge ready market in hobbyist/educational products as well as the commercial products that have used it as a convenient choice. There's that whole non-profit/educational heritage around them that likely selects for a different set of defaults…

> They're probably produced in far greater numbers than most off-the-shelf STM32 or CH32V chips. I highly doubt it. The RP2xxx lacks the built-in functionality for use in, say, a car, and it isn't cheap and fully-integrated enough for dime-a-dozen gadget application. They are great for hobbyists due to their low barrier to entry, but there really isn't a niche they serve when it comes to mass-produced electronics.

> They are great for hobbyists due to their low barrier to entry, but there really isn't a niche they serve when it comes to mass-produced electronics.

This.

Just programming a microcontroller is generally a pain, but a pain that hardware manufacturers can deal with, because they have employees with experience, who can read the long datasheets, get proper programmers and run the manufacturers software packages to program everything.

For hobbyists, you're basically limited to arduinos, esp??/??, and rpi picos, only those are guaranteed to have a lot of software support, documentation, easy availability on aliexpress etc. for cheap, and can be made to actually do some stuff in an afternoon of tinkering.

(technically it's the same with proper RPis, where they're the only SBC board (not x86 baed) that you're guaranteed will have at least some software support after 5+ years).

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