91–100 of 129 posts
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I doubt that matters considering China stole a complete copy of ARM (the company) and has already released new IP under their rebranded name.
The stolen architectures cannot be legitimately sold outside of China, due to patents held by ARM ltd. RISC-V avoids these headaches.
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A fees dollars saved from not paying ARM will guarantee adoption in low end laptops, tablets and smartphones. $100 Laptops, $70 phones and $50 tablets will be a big target for RISC-V.
All of those things you mention take advantage of the economies of scale of ARM production. They exist because a few years ago the basebands they're using were top of the line and were used in upmarket devices. They can buy an old baseband/board design, attach a screen and battery, and have a cheapo device for essentially zero development cost. If RISC-V doesn't see the development for upmarket products it's not goin…
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Isn't the clock generator a discrete component? Do modern CPUs and GPUs have integrated clocks?
I do not know -- but when I talk about High Quality Quartz, I am talking about the raw material that is needed to manufacture Silicon Wafers. https://www.waferworld.com/post/9-things-you-might-not-have-...
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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…
> Exynos Chromebooks and such led the way to ARM Macbooks the same way the IBM PC led to displacing DEC and Sun workstations I think chrome books had very little to do with it. A lot of the work had already happened with the PowerPC switch. On the processor front, Apple’s arm processors aren’t at all like exynos chips that use standard arm cores. I would say that the apple silicon macs are more influenced by iPhone a…
There's a whole world of ARM processors out there. The ISA, packaging, software, and expertise around it everywhere in the world helps make that ecosystem stronger. Before ARM there was Intel, and before Intel was PowerPC, yet even before that there were the 68000 series Macs. And before the Mac, there were the 65816 in the IIgs and the 6502 in the Apple II. Don't be surprised if Apple is an early adopter of RISC-V for support processors. If they decide they've made them performant enough after a few years of that, don't be surprised if they use them as CPUs and stop needing to license cores and ISAs from ARM at all.
But I can promise you one thing. Apple didn't look at the 18 MHz v7 cores from Cirrus Logic in the Psion Series 5 and immediately decide they could make a mainstream desktop CPU out of it. The competition of companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Broadcom in consumer electronics has a lot to do with how ARM cores became suitable for Macbook.
Using RISC-V doesn't let you bypass chip shortages... Do they actually understand what they're talking about?
Sometimes it's not about an actual shortage, but more of an imposed (political/business motivated) shortage. If RISC-V can alleviate these concerns, the alleged 'shortage' may disappear.
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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,…
not just the chip shortage. The rise of RISC-V coincides with a couple of other events in the industry. The first is the slowing of Moore’s Law, meaning that increases in total processing power no longer comes along with each new fabrication node. The second is the meteoric rise in machine learning, demanding massive increases in processing power. https://semiengineering.com/why-risc-v-is-succeeding/
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> Exynos Chromebooks and such led the way to ARM Macbooks the same way the IBM PC led to displacing DEC and Sun workstations I think chrome books had very little to do with it. A lot of the work had already happened with the PowerPC switch. On the processor front, Apple’s arm processors aren’t at all like exynos chips that use standard arm cores. I would say that the apple silicon macs are more influenced by iPhone a…
Apple wouldn't have used ARM for the iPhone and iPad if the cores hadn't been proven in other similar platforms. ARM goes back a long time. My Psion palmtops have ARM cores. Many of the WinCE systems have ARM cores. The ARM processors in fact go back to 1985, with the ARM Development System for the BBC Micro and then the Archimedes in 1987. There's a whole world of ARM processors out there. The ISA, packaging, softwa…
Given that and in the absence of a clear rationale I find it hard to see why Apple would want to to incur the costs of a move to an ISA it’s had no influence over - certainly not to save an immaterial licensing fee.
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Why do you call them "spy" chips? Have they been found to generally have backdoors? In an embedded context, a lot of that doesn't matter either way - your dumb coffee maker doesn't have a lot of opportunity to spy on you anyway. Smart devices are a very different story. However, Chinese embedded chips are often very cheap for the capabilities.
And all Intel and AMD processors have "spy" capabilities too with the built-in black-box Intel Management Engine and AMD Platform Security Processor. And it's only becoming more powerful and commonplace with remote attestation and Microsoft Pluton. In a few years PCs might become just like mobile phones - the bootloader locked down requiring signed images from Microsoft, etc. Given all of that, China seems like a gre…
State sponsored extortion is still a thing.