Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
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Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
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Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#210 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#3I wish I could buy stock in RISC-V (in the abstract).
See also today: https://twitter.com/SiFive/status/1570880204804849671
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#4Testing the waters.
Notably, Apple was among main investors when ARM was a startup; they're not doing this to save in ARM fees.
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#5Jim Keller's slide [1] on RISC-V. Simple words. Grug like.
[1] https://www.techgoing.com/jim-keller-innovation-is-happening...
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#610 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
One thing to note is that RISC-V is only royalty-free for people making custom silicon implementations - i.e. the equivalent of an ARM architectural license. You still have to design the cores and that's the really hard part, moreso than designing the ISA.
Apple is in a unique position where they have all these Cortex cores for various reasons, but also have the resources to actually design a RISC-V implementation that could replace them all. I doubt the people designing flash controller ICs have that level of design experience.
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#710 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
It's more likely that RISC-V replaces MIPS than ARM, although it's certainly competing for the latter too.
...and USB flash drives are more likely to be based on 8051s than ARM in volume.
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#8This is a two paragraph, highly speculative "summary" of [0] which was posted earlier [1].
But even reading the original article, it barely mentions Apple and CharlesW highly editorialized that submissions title:
The Apple bit:
> For example, Apple’s A15 has more than a dozen Arm-based CPU cores distributed across the die for various non-user-facing functions. SemiAnalysis can confirm that these cores are actively being converted to RISC-V in future generations of hardware.
The original title:
> SiFive Powers Google TPU, NASA, Tenstorrent, Renesas, Microchip, And More
The bulk of the article is about Google and hyping Risk-V, not Apple.
[0] https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/sifive-powers-google-tpu...
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#910 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
One thing to note is that RISC-V is only royalty-free for people making custom silicon implementations - i.e. the equivalent of an ARM architectural license. You still have to design the cores and that's the really hard part, moreso than designing the ISA. Apple is in a unique position where they have all these Cortex cores for various reasons, but also have the resources to actually design a RISC-V implementation th…
There seem to be a bunch of open source risc-v cores.
Such as the CORE-V cores. However I’m not sure how suitable they are for commercial use compared to the proprietary options.
Re: Apple to Move a Part of Its Embedded Cores to RISC-V
#1010 billion RISC-V cores were shipped last year - mostly you wont see them because they're heavily embedded - in disk drives/etc - used to be every flash drive had an ARM core in it and paid a few pennies to ARM, that's likely to change quickly
Shipped last year or shipped in total?