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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”

#311

Post by porridgeraisin »

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…

I dont know about the social aspects since I don't live there, but as far as AI goes, it's not just HN. There is no place where you get balanced takes that match the work that we actually do day to day. I suspect part of this is accelerated by the media practices of the hyperscalers like anthropic and openai - they make doomerism super profitable for publishers. One of the most natural emergent counterweights to doomerism is over-skepticism. That is my theory for why it is the way it is. The remaining over-hype is a counterweight to this over-skepticism (I'm not talking about altman hyping his business, I mean the general tech people going around bashing sutton and lecun and mentioning "AGI")

Even publications, semianalysis is the only major, decent one in my experience (excluding personal blogs).

Everything is low SNR for AI - have you seen ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS recently?? There is almost no point even going except for meeting people which we do by scheduling talks back and forth every few months anyways.

I also find IRL, then a carefully curated twitter timeline with the politics toggle on the settings page set to off, are the only ways to get high SNR information about AI.

I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here.

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

#312

Post by saltcured »

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…

It was also a messy time where software did make a lot of difference to your experience of performance. I had a few of these apples to oranges comparisons that frustrated me, as someone who absorbed the 90s counter-culture message that MS and Intel were monopolistic and needed to be displaced.

In the mid 90s, I got myself a DEC Multia (small Alpha-based workstation) to run Linux. It was fast at some things, but useless to browse the newly emerging web. Netscape Navigator wasn't available as an Alpha binary, and the emulated x86 was just as slow as an early Python based browser. Running Netscape on a 486DX3-100 was night and day like visiting the future. Some other native programs went the other way, with the Alpha beating the 486 dearly. But the web browser became more and more significant.

In college, I was also told I should covet Sun hardware. At my first job, I got issued a Sun Ultra workstation of some sort. I was appalled at how slow it was for my FOSS C programming workflows with autoconf/make/gcc etc. I started bringing in a Dell notebook with a Pentium-MMX running Linux, and it ran circles around the Ultra for actual day to day tasks. On the other hand, when I had to run certain commercial tools like Purify, the Sun was useful again.

I also had exposure to supercomputer centers at the time, doing portability work for our HPC codebase. It was often crazy how slow these platforms were for development work. There may have been a little bit of neglect by the vendors or IT groups in terms of what hardware they dedicated as front-end service nodes on these big machines. But, there were also dramatic differneces in the operating system behavior, tuned to get one user-level job running and get out of the way. They were terrible at multitasking, and this showed through in CLI/scripted interactivity too.

Sometimes, I wonder if some of those platforms could have survived if they jumped on the Linux bandwagon and kept developing their hardware. But maybe their fate was sealed because they depended on the bundling of their proprietary OS and hardware, neither of which was able to adapt to the new order...

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

#313

Post by alephnerd »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #311
alephnerd wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I dont know about the social aspects since I don't live there, but as far as AI goes, it's not just HN. There is no place where you get balanced takes that match the work that we actually do day to day. I suspect part of this is accelerated by the media practices of the hyperscalers like anthropic and openai - they make doomerism super profitable for publishers. One of the most natural emergent counterweights to doom…

> I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here

I agree. The thing is, a lot of us moved to Lobsters [0] because of the higher SNR. That is probably the closest to what would be heard amongst engineers in the Bay.

[0] - https://lobste.rs/

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

#314

Post by RetroTechie »

hylaride wrote: post #304
LeFantome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 desig…

My understanding is that RISC-V needs both economies of scale AND chips that are manufactured at the bleeding edge fabs (smallest dies, etc) which is a lot more expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem as there's not (yet?) demand. The architectural limitations will remain until there's incentive to work on it. In many ways it's not much different than Linux was in the 1990s. It was cheap and useful, but often not a…

> RISC-V needs both economies of scale AND chips that are manufactured at the bleeding edge fabs (smallest dies, etc) which is a lot more expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem as there's not (yet?) demand

Whatever leading-edge fab capacity (mostly TSMC) was available, is now tied up to supply the ongoing AI boom. And will remain so for the foreseeable future. Even if you'd have a RISC-V product for which demand/economics work out, chances are those fabs' order books are filled.

Also: design is done in many places, but actual fabrication of RISC-V SoCs in largely centered in China. Which (afaik) doesn't lack IC fabrication capacity. But does lag in leading-edge fab capacity. So: off to older nodes. Which may hurt perf/W, cost effectiveness or transistor budget. Or pay a premium (pricing products out of markets), limited production, or long lead times.

Of course this affects ARM based & other products too. But they've been in the optimization / mass fabrication / distribution pipeline much longer than most RISC-V based products. Catching up takes time, and top-tier fab capacity being swiped by Nvidia & co doesn't help to shorten that process.

I don't think it's a demand problem. Consumers don't care what powers their phone/tablet/laptop as long as it does its job. So in principle the market is there (yeah.. I understand issues like Google still working on Android-RISC-V, Windows users probably wanting x86 for legacy software etc).

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

#315

Post by alightsoul »

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…

And the author would much rather pay 4 dollars for the item plus shipping with RISC v, than 200 dollars in shippimg for a 1 dollar arm chip on digikey with us shipping

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

#316

Post by debo_ »

ksec wrote: post #44
moomin wrote: post #2

Absolutely hugged to death.

> Request Limit: 500 per minute I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.

The website runs on RISC-V.

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

#317

Post by alightsoul »

ghostly_s wrote: post #141

I lost the thread of his argument when he brought up the shipping expense: > I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on then follows with: > 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. When shipping is so exp…

The difference is shipping from the us to shipping from china. From the us you pay 200 dollars for a 1 dollar arm processor due to shipping. From china you pay 4 dollars in shipping for a 10 cent processor. Apparently buying arm processors in china is not reliable and of course you wouldn't buy a RISC v processor in the us due to shipping costs when shipping from china is 50 times cheaper.

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

#318

Post by dmitrygr »

ant6n wrote: post #247
dmitrygr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, so RiscV is still also a brick, like x86?

in my opinion, yes. Given that it was a clean-sheet design with no legacy to support, and that it was done so recently as to have easily had the benefit of all the lessons of x86, mips, arm, sparc, powerpc, etc, yes, it left a lot of obvious improvements on the table.

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

#320

Post by alightsoul »

mrheosuper wrote: post #228

> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error Idk, if your shipping cost is $120, it sounds to me $1 is rounding error.

You can avoid the shipping cost by shipping from china, but then only RISC v chips are reliable.
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