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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”

#291

Post by nisegami »

Shipping to Trinidad and Tobago is a bit atypical. It's misguided to try to ship directly to here like you would most other countries. If you do, I can certainly see OP "pay[s] anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips". Instead, what most people actually do is have stuff shipped to a freight forwarding company in Florida who imports it to Trinidad. Ultimately, this means that goods cost 1xx% of what they cost in the US, with a weaker currency and lower wages. But the xx in that equation for many things ends up being smaller than you'd think. Of course, this also means that Trump's changes affect us as well which has been a real damper on importing stuff from outside the US through this means. As a result, I tried ordering more stuff directly from China and the experience was largely cheaper but much, much more frustrating. That is, until my most recent couple of orders where the company AliExpress contracted with to do delivery just did the same thing I described above and sent it to a forwarding company in Florida, who then passed the charges on to me.

I know I'm not really commenting on any of the technical nuances of RISC-V (my take: trying to be everything to everyone isn't easy, but it can still be worth trying), but I was just so shocked to realize the OP was form the same country.

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

#292

Post by vachina »

windward wrote: post #282
LeFantome wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 behol…

Those standards are adopted because they work. And they work because someone poured in tons of RnD to make them work. And those people are incentivised to do the RnD because they get paid (patents).

Nowadays nobody will want to work on foundational open source work for free only to enrich everyone else that builds on top of it.

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

#293

Post by jonwinstanley »

Tomte wrote: post #235
ricksunny wrote: post #144

Who uses the term '3rd world' 'third world' anymore?

And nobody has used the term in the original meaning (i.e. outside both American and Russian bloc) for the last decades anyway.

Yes! This is my pet hate. Third world does not mean poor. Switzerland is third world as it was aligned to neither bloc.

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

#294

Post by jabl »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #89
initramfs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/ Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens... (Caveat: The startup is acquainted with the Intel CEO, so it's rare for them to grant the x86 lic…

I'll also point out that we've always had better starting points for open source high performance cores. SPARC and POWER both have open ISAs and open-source cores with useful performance. The UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors were open sourced under the OpenSPARC project. POWER has the OpenPOWER project governing the Power ISA, and IBM itself created Microwatt, Chiselwatt, and the A2I/A2O cores as open source that peop…

Yes, but compared to RISC-V neither OpenSPARC nor OpenPOWER are really going anywhere. Not really sure why, maybe the lawyers read the fine print about the level of openness they actually provide and decide that nope, not gonna touch that one?

Technically just looking at the ISA both SPARC and POWER seem fine enough. So why is nobody interested?

(Talos is interesting but not really an answer to the question, as it seems to be focused on building affordable-ish systems around an existing CPU, not developing new CPU's.)

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

#295

Post by Conan_Kudo »

avadodin wrote: post #157
fragmede wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a local thing, Hong Kong being a British colony means there's plenty of people in the UK for whom Asian means Chinese.

Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian. The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.

It's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.

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

#296

Post by Conan_Kudo »

jabl wrote: post #294
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll also point out that we've always had better starting points for open source high performance cores. SPARC and POWER both have open ISAs and open-source cores with useful performance. The UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processors were open sourced under the OpenSPARC project. POWER has the OpenPOWER project governing the Power ISA, and IBM itself created Microwatt, Chiselwatt, and the A2I/A2O cores as open source that peop…

Yes, but compared to RISC-V neither OpenSPARC nor OpenPOWER are really going anywhere. Not really sure why, maybe the lawyers read the fine print about the level of openness they actually provide and decide that nope, not gonna touch that one? Technically just looking at the ISA both SPARC and POWER seem fine enough. So why is nobody interested? (Talos is interesting but not really an answer to the question, as it se…

OpenSPARC is under the GPL, which is probably why it didn't go anywhere directly. OpenPOWER is under permissive creative commons licenses, and people are iterating on the open source cores released by them. But the arrangement with efabless didn't go anywhere, and the company shut down last year without warning. So there's nowhere to experiment with producing chips.

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

#297

Post by SuchAnonMuchWow »

bjackman wrote: post #272
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…

> too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible Sorry I haven't actually read the original article so this is a bit of a driveby. But, I'm skeptical of this? Surely whichever cloud platform first offers RISC-V compute, the next cloud platforms will ship a CPU that's compatible. Probably they'll be RFTing the same CPU vendors and they won't need to coordinate explicitly for this to happen. Then everyone…

I'm not completely sure, but are cloud versions of the distros actually recompiling the packages ?

I though it was mostly: "select a minimal set of packages needed for docker and co", not "recompile all the packages you want in your distro".

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

#298

Post by tkfu »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #270
crote wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pro…

> 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

This isn't quite true, though it's true at the RPi's price point. For example, Toradex (disclosure: I work for Toradex) produces the colibri-imx6 system-on-module that can be turned into an SBC with a stock carrier board. It was introduced in 2014, continues to be supported today, and will continue to be supported until 2036. But that level of long-term support and maintenance costs money, and the pricing reflects that.

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

#299

Post by bjackman »

mike_hearn wrote: post #280
bjackman wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RiscV is going to win despite its limitations, simply because they can be worked around freely, and the cost per core is zero. This feels right to me. I've worked on embedded systems and OS my whole career and it just doesn't really feel like riscv wins or loses on technical merit to me. Boots-on-the-ground engineers might grumble but the decisions that matter here just aren't made by them. Otherwise why would we s…

We use x86 because the implementations are fast and there's so much software encoded with it. This makes up for the problems of the design. RISC-V doesn't have either of those advantages, though.

Yeah my x86 comment wasn't meant to suggest RISCV can easily beat x86 it was pointing out that "being a good arch" is very low on the list of priorities for making the arch successful.

Exactly as you say, x86 is successful coz there are really good x86 CPUs and a SW ecosystem. Not because it's a good arch. Similarly I think, if it wins, RISCV will win because there's enough demand for a nonproprietary ISA, and this trumps basically everything else.

Another way to say this: I've seen internal slide decks about ISA strategy that target C-suites at megacorps. Not once do those slide decks ever go into technical dis/advantages, coz the people steering the 9-figure investments don't give a shit. If you piped up in those meetings and said "RISCV sucks though!!!" you would just be ignored and not invited back.

It's not really any different from startups. Tech stacks matter but there's a huge number of successful companies out there running total garbage and who knows how many perfectly engineered products go out of business every day coz the thing they perfectly engineered was not useful.

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

#300

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, people locally buy stuff on Amazon and online not just because they can't find it locally, but because they sell it for cheaper taking into account freight forwarding. In Panama this also works out because the exchange rate is exactly the value of the us dollar.

It seems freight forwarders are most common in countries like the Bahamas with Laser international freight and Panama where local currency is pegged 1 to 1 to the US dollar, because the value per dollar always remains the same, so buying online is never more expensive due to fluctuating exchange rates.

But they're used in all of Latin America and are very popular in Brazil too with astral freight services. FedEx and ups can be used in place of DHL.

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