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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”

#281

Post by graemep »

graemep wrote: post #116
chronic7403 wrote: post #43

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

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

To add, thinking about that comment. It is quite offensive. It essentially comes down to "brown people are all the same". I assumed it was the result of ignorance rather than bigotry, but it being the only comment from a new account makes me think otherwise.

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

#282

Post by windward »

LeFantome wrote: post #224
muyuu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't agree with history telling us that at all. HDMI, MP3, MPEG, .docx, DirectX, CUDA, I'm sure there are more. History tells us that money wins.

But I also think this is an example of a slight disingenuity in RISC-V being referred to as open-source. It's borrowing the clout of open-source software projects where the end user has the freedom to compile them at home. I can't fabricate a CPU at home, I'm still beholden to whatever patents the manufacturer chooses to license. SiFive have a >billion dollar valuation, for a business based on selling licences.

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

#283

Post by twhitmore »

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…

Good article, and I agree with the author's enthusiasm.

However his points that "cheap parts are a great enabler" and "shipping costs are high to Trinidad and Tobago", while true, don't actually counter the OP's points that "feature determination needs to be universal" and "the instruction set is poorly designed".

Others have said application authors will code to the specific platform, but that's not true of library authors -- they need portability.

Why can the RISC-V team not get basic stuff like feature determination right? No matter how stupid the rest of the instruction set is, I'm with OP that the responsible individuals should retire from the committee.

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

#284

Post by nottorp »

What isn’t clear to me is why the article this one is a reply to is complaining that there is a third alternative for CPUs. Even if it’s not as advanced as the other 2.

Would they like a world where Intel is the sole CPU supplier? We were close to that one…

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

#285

Post by hn_submit »

strenholme wrote: post #187

I believe there will come a day when RISC-V has comparable or better performance than ARM and x86_64. This is based on history: I remember when x86 performance compared to the DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. was a joke. There was a time when, if you wanted real performance, you needed to pony up $20,000-$50,000 for a workstation with a MIPS/PA-RISC/SPARC/Alpha/whatever processor. All these workstations smoked the x86…

The x86 only caught up because of process technology, less so due to technological innovation (RISCifying x86 architecture). DEC, HP and MIPS simply couldn't keep up with Intel, which had its own fabs. And this was at a time when fabs-for-hire with world-leading process technology like TSMC didn't yet exist.

Today, almost any fabless manufacturer can order world-class leading semiconductors from TSMC, just like Apple is doing now.

Drawback is that most RISC-V manufacturers are in China, which don't have access to TSMC's manufacturing technology. And Apple is heavily invested in ARM since it owns part of the technology.

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

#286

Post by TMWNN »

alightsoul wrote: post #222
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,…

Thanks for the rundown. Context for others: If you ever sell anything online to Doral FL, it's a freight forwarder. DE and OR (no sales tax), KY, and TX are also popular, but 90% of the time it's a FL address and 90% of the time it's Doral.

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

#287

Post by K0balt »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #271
K0balt wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, im a big fan of what riscV has brought into the world; 0.50 cent processors with radios that can reach a kilometer, 8 cent MCUs that you can put anywhere because they are basically free, 8 dollar Linux computers, and 1 dollar WiFi nodes that can run reasonable applications. And also, the first application capable chip you can actually trust to be free of unpublished capabilities. RiscV is going to win despite…

> And also, the first application capable chip you can actually trust to be free of unpublished capabilities. I am not in the embedded space. Can you explain your thinking behind this comment?

Subtly tainted RNGs, flash download backdoors, interfaces that allow covert JTAG are all “features” that can be found in some widely used chips. Because of the freedom of the riscV license, we have microscope inspectable processors being launched by tiny companies that are focused on security and privacy. https://baochip.com/

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

#288

Post by sylware »

acutelittlebox wrote: post #212
sylware wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All on latest silicon process?

no, i'm talking about the core designs, not finished CPUs you could buy. using a leading-edge node is prohibitively expensive so nearly everything RISC-V i've seen has been using around 22nm to 12nm nodes. if you had an example of any of those cores in a finished product on a similar node they should be competitive, and in the meantime once people can get their hands on them you could test them against each other at…

Then if I understood well what you said: the main bottleneck for many of those RISC-V microarchitectures is the access to the best silicon process. (ofc, they will have to optimize them for this node process)

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

#289

Post by sylware »

LeFantome wrote: post #223
sylware wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So RISC-V is 'dragged down' because it cannot access the best silicon process (hardware big tech is hogging production capacity... how convenient...)

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

#290

Post by sylware »

zephen wrote: post #211
sylware wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this would be orders of magnitude more horrible with x86_64?

Hard to know at this point. In the past ARM sued people for daring to think about implementing ARM compatible computers. (Even university research projects.) Of course, in the more distant past, AMD and Intel sued each other a lot. But there have been a dozen or so x86 market entrants. I think the competition has just been brutal. So, with either one, you could, of course, do a clean-sheet design and hope you don't g…

Allright, you did describe a monstruous IP mine-field. No way anybody could reasonably use anything else than RISC-V.
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