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Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

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Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#41

Post by crote »

zogomoox wrote: post #19
mlindner wrote: post #11

Using RISC-V doesn't let you bypass chip shortages... Do they actually understand what they're talking about?

Eventually, if you have pin-compatible chips from several manufacturers, they could replace chips from lets say Taiwan with ones from Europe perhaps?

More likely to be the other way around, actually.

Boards are getting designed for a specific chip and you are extremely unlikely to change that - unless the original is no longer available. Re-engineering for a new chip can be a massive pain - even if the new one is pin-compatible. If you are delivering high-quality products, you are not going to switch.

With the exception of some trivial ones, western manufacturers don't really make pin-compatible chips. Creating a chip which is electronically identical is not easy at all - and don't forget you probably have to make it firmware-compatible as well. The end result is that you now have exactly the same product as your competitor, so you are now competing primarily on price and making it easier for your customers to leave you. Oh, and you open yourself up to lawsuits too. Creating unique products is way for those manufacturers.

On the other hand, eastern manufacturers are more than happy to create exact clones. A lot of shitty electronics don't really care too much about things like longevity, warranty, compatibility, or even regulations. Just make sure it functions well enough to make it out of the store. So a manufacturer like GigaDevice creates the GD32F103, which is pretty much a clone of the STM32F103 by STMicroelectronics - down to firmware compatibility. Won't get used in any product whose brand you recognize, but with the ongoing chip shortage they are definitely selling like hot cakes.

But implementing an instruction set is not easy, and ARM might actually try to do something about it if you do it without their permission. With RISC-V, you can just grab any random implementation! Perhaps even an open-source one? GigaDevice has already released their first RISC-V clone: the GD32VF103. Again a clone of the STM32F103, but you now need to recompile for a different ISA.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#42

Post by throwaway4good »

oneplane wrote: post #27
justahuman74 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more about a potential future usage of ARM in a sanctions package. Somewhat similar to how Hauwai was was hit with a list of narrow prohibitions like access to the android store. Having an openly implementable ISA is just one less thing to worry about

I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP under their rebranded name.

Arm China majority shareholders announce the company’s corporate governance issue has been resolved

https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/04/arm-china-majority-...

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#43

Post by mysterydip »

cptskippy wrote: post #38
mysterydip wrote: post #29

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#44

Post by tyingq »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #3

I suspect most of RISC-V development is more towards moving away from western controlled ISA's that can be sanctioned for any reason. Points about avoid shortages from any fab being allowed to fabricate RISC-V CPUs is just the "cherry on top".

Western Digital was probably more excited about the no-royalties model.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#45

Post by cptskippy »

sremani wrote: post #20

Access to high purity quartz is the real bottle neck. You can have your own fabs and designs.. but if America and Russia refuse to sell you some Quartz.. you are out of luck! https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hi... .

Isn't the clock generator a discrete component? Do modern CPUs and GPUs have integrated clocks?

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#46

Post by Consultant32452 »

mysterydip wrote: post #29

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?

I feel like this could be reasonable for boutique production, but if you're dumpster diving it may be difficult to order millions of exactly the same part this way.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#48

Post by crote »

mysterydip wrote: post #29

What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?

It depends.

First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing. They are highly specialized application-specific electronics, which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate, and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem, where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips - which have often been available for a decade or more. The applications they are being used in do not really require a lot of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable. We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty of power for some obscure automotive module.

Although recycling is technically sort-of possible, it is extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and associated price hike, it isn't really economically viable. Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly.

On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be the the last resort - not the first.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#49

Post by crote »

mysterydip wrote: post #43
cptskippy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really slap an AT motherboard in an LED light bulb and call it a day. Fabs produce all manner of chips, not just GPUs and CPUs. Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.

Good point. What about repurposing FPGAs?

Barely anyone uses FPGAs. They are pretty much only in use in highly specialized enterprise-grade hardware. Think a €5000 SSL accelerator.

Re: Amid chip shortages, companies bet on RISC-V

#50

Post by marcosdumay »

digitallyfree wrote: post #37
cestith wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the biggest subsegment of the desktop space, but there are a good number of people using Pi-level devices as a second desktop. RiscOS, Linux, NetBSD, and even Windows run on Raspberry Pi. Some of those run on several other similarly powered boards. In the open source space, plenty of apps already support AMD64, ARM32 and ARM64 and the distros distribute for them. If I can get Debian or Ubuntu on a system wit…

I would imagine that "good number of people" are mostly Linux hobbyists, and from my personal experience most people use them as a tinkering or IOT device rather than a full-blown desktop due to the lack of performance. If you're mostly in the terminal that's fine, but for running complex web apps a used x86 would make more sense. I can definitely see that hobbyist market and future Pi-like devices moving to RISC-V,…

"Good number of people" is many thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands.

And I know of 3 families that have pi based desktops at home, and use them as desktops. (One of those has a person that works in IT in it.) I don't know anybody that has "experimental desktops" that they use only to thinker with, AFAIK, when people assembly a desktop, it's because they want to use as a desktop.

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