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Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

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Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#51

Post by Retric »

zsrxx wrote: post #49
ksec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.

Why can't a GPU power a computer?

The biggest issue is lack of huge caches, and the extreme latency to main memory due to the speed of light.

GPU’s are fine or even better for a wide range of compute tasks see CUDA etc, they just end up being very slow at a subset of common tasks.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#52

Post by kinghajj »

atdrummond wrote: post #36
kinghajj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BOOM is close to Ivy Bridge IPC in one benchmark. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~celio/

Using MHz as a divisor really benefits BOOM and extrapolating from IPC makes some assumptions regarding the future ability of the chip to scale to similar frequencies as Intel's product line. Assuming the best performing BOOM chip refers to the 2018 HotChips tapeout, that chip operated at 1.0 GHz. The lowest speed Ivy Bridge Core/Pentium (a design getting close to a decade old, FWIW) was 2.5 GHz. This means on a core…

IPC means "instructions per cycle," so it's correct to divide the scores by frequency. Totally agree that in total performance, no realized BOOM chip comes close to mainstream Intel chips. I think Chris is working at Esperanto Technologies (https://www.esperanto.ai/technology/); hopefully, they upstream performance improvements to the BOOM open-source repo.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#53

Post by hutzlibu »

mises wrote: post #25
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

The problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or…

Let's be real, the Chinese have been stealing technology right and left for years. Losses number between $225 and $600 billion per year [0]. One in five companies has had its technology stolen [1]. They will just steal the tech. Or maybe they'll decide it's easier to work with AMD (they're already doing it on the CPU side [2]). This is not popular to say, but it is accurate and my statements are sourced. Feel free to…

The losses numbers are from a US government investigation. So they might have some bias ... and therefore not really mean anything.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#54

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

redm wrote: post #43
jsgo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. This would be a impediment typically, but considering they're blackballed already, how beholden are they to patents? Block imports? Think that's being done already. Requiring US companies to not do business with them? That's being done already. At this point, they just have to ride out the US/China trade war and then when thin…

You imply Huawei was playing by the "rules" and not already stealing. [1] [2] [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/us-indicts-huawe... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-st...

"Tappy" again, plus a story from Bloomberg, which has shattered its reputation when it comes to technology/security reporting (SuperMicro, among other false articles whipping up anti-Chinese hysteria).

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#55

Post by devit »

hutzlibu wrote: post #50
ksec wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.

Can you explain, why CPU's do not scale so well?

Because GPUs always run trivially parallelizable workloads and CPUs usually don't.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#56

Post by rjsw »

monocasa wrote: post #48
garmaine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of work being done on RISC-V vector computing and GPU equivalents. E.g.: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RI...

As someone who looked hard into it, RISC-V doesn't really make sense for a GPU shaders, IMO. You'd have to change so many things about how the ISA works that you wouldn't get a benefit to using a common ISA. Stuff like how shaders are batched and dispatched, textures accesses make sense to be their own instructions, you want a larger register file on the scalar side, the memory barrier semantics are much more complex…

Nvidia are supposed to be using RISC-V inside future GPUs.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#57

Post by atdrummond »

kinghajj wrote: post #52
atdrummond wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using MHz as a divisor really benefits BOOM and extrapolating from IPC makes some assumptions regarding the future ability of the chip to scale to similar frequencies as Intel's product line. Assuming the best performing BOOM chip refers to the 2018 HotChips tapeout, that chip operated at 1.0 GHz. The lowest speed Ivy Bridge Core/Pentium (a design getting close to a decade old, FWIW) was 2.5 GHz. This means on a core…

IPC means "instructions per cycle," so it's correct to divide the scores by frequency. Totally agree that in total performance, no realized BOOM chip comes close to mainstream Intel chips. I think Chris is working at Esperanto Technologies ( https://www.esperanto.ai/technology/); hopefully, they upstream performance improvements to the BOOM open-source repo.

I understand and I appreciate the test from an intellectual standpoint. But the IPC definition is orthogonal to meaningful performance benchmarking when I can't get real world equivalent clock frequencies of each processor type.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#58

Post by dahfizz »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #46
dahfizz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sure, not so for 3rd party apps. Ideally, once there is a JVM that runs on riscv, those apps are ported for free. An openJDK port is underway. I have no idea how much work it would be for Android to port its APIs, but Google certainly has the manpower if this is something they want.

I don't know why there would be _any_ porting involved. Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. The major pain points today are the JITs, which applies to Java and JavaScript in particular. There has been preciously little (public) progress on these.

> Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it.

But the compiler (openjdk in this case) still needs to be ported, no?

EDIT: I think we are talking about two different things. The Java compiler (which emits Java bytecode) should be ported for convenience but that is not necessary. The compiler which compiles the actual JVM into an executable doesn't need to be ported, but it does need to have support added for emitting riscv machine code.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#59

Post by madez »

gruez wrote: post #47
cmiles74 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it won't contain a vendor "management engine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...

Maybe, but I doubt it. It's there to support a bunch of features that companies want (eg. remote management, trusted computing, etc.). The reason why the consumer version has it is that most consumers don't mind, and having a seperate sku with it disabled/not present would cost extra. This won't change with RISC-V. You might be able to get a low performance part without it, but all the mainstream (ie. high performanc…

Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that.

With RISC-V, it is reasonable to expect multiple vendors to provide CPUs. There is a very good case to expect non-backdoored chips.

Re: Huawei Seeks Independence from the US with RISC-V and Ascend Chips

#60

Post by Taniwha »

mises wrote: post #25
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #20

The problem is that while RISC-V may deliver an excellent open ISA, there is no equivalent open solution for the GPU/display controller side. As I understand it, the GPU world is full of patents and dominated by just a few parties. I don't think there's something that Huawei or other Chinese manufacturers could easily start with and extend. So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or…

Let's be real, the Chinese have been stealing technology right and left for years. Losses number between $225 and $600 billion per year [0]. One in five companies has had its technology stolen [1]. They will just steal the tech. Or maybe they'll decide it's easier to work with AMD (they're already doing it on the CPU side [2]). This is not popular to say, but it is accurate and my statements are sourced. Feel free to…

You can't steal an open source ISA .... unless you don't follow the license (which in this case is trivial to do)
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