61–70 of 93 posts
Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too? The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other application specific mods.
Beer. Pretty sure they will be precompiled RTL blobs.
They are. Encrypted, too.
The press release linked by OP doesn't give the full story. For a better perspective see https://abopen.com/news/arm-offers-free-as-in-beer-cortex-ip... If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures - doing everything from awkward, backfiring smear campaigns against RISC-V[1] to straight up l…
The commetization of the CPU market was bound to happen eventually. As modern production techniques for chips and FPGA programming start to converge rapidly. What is the ETA until we get a GNX "GNX is Not X86"? An Open source i386 core that people can run existing applications on? Much like GNU offered a standardized FOSS platform people could run existing Unix workloads on.
[1] https://github.com/alfikpl/ao486
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2QcW6r3MlDThUnC8cA-r...
Hold your applause until we can see the innards of an AArch64 implementation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is really just one of scale. If you ship 400M drives a year (as the global hard drive industry did last year), a cost savings of $1 is a lot of money that goes into your pocket/R&D. If you're making 10000 of something, making a custom chip is almost certainly going to cost you a fortune; if you're making tens or hundreds of millions of something, that cost gets amortized very quickly, I imagine. If…
Yeah, in consumer electronics the hardware engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors. Well, not that bad. Probably. "Can't you do that in software?" 50M units later you understand the reason why that hardware guy made your life a living hell for two weeks just before release, because what he did saved ten cents on the motherboard and at scale that's real money .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I don't understand is does it really cost a company like WD that much to license or just buy already manufactured chips? It would seem taking risks on new architectures, and all the extra development time (both chip and tooling) would far outweigh the cost of just licensing arm. Can someone explain the economics of it all? Don't get me wrong, I am all for a free competitor to ARM's near monopoly on the mobile em…
When you get large enough, doing it yourself can become cheaper than buying it, and small %0.5 improvement projects can have big benefits since they accumulate. RISC-V feels like CPU hardware's linux moment right now.
Sounds really good. Is it only free as in free beer or editable too? The interesting applications for RISC-V are Vector Extensions and other application specific mods.
"DesignStart Eval enables completely free access to fixed-configuration Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M3 and full subsystem RTL for evaluation, prototype, teaching, and research. Available to all*, the packages can be downloaded instantly, requiring only a simple click-through agreement. " and if you want to make a product, "DesignStart Pro enables access to the full Cortex-M0, Cortex-M3, and subsystem RTL. Available to compa…
How suitable is RISC-V for military use? If we were to redesign the F-16 from scratch in 2018, would be able to make it using hardened Arm or RISC-V chips in place of x86 processors?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're just joining us, Arm very much sees the up and coming RISC-V stack as an immediate threat to the future of their business and is taking pro-active countermeasures By any chance, does anyone know if Intel is funding RISC-V? According to the logic of "Commoditizing the Complement" one way of hurting a competitor is to make their product a commodity.
Intel Capital participated in SiFive's Series C funding round. Besides that I don't know of anything else Intel has done for risc-v.
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/106902...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A great question .... all the 386 patents are out of date now right?
They are. We're pretty close to Pentium Pro in terms of patent expiration.