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Open Source RISC V Processor Gets Support From Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Tesla (seekingalpha.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Google, Qualcomm, and Samsung "are among 80 tech companies joining forces to develop a new open-source chip design for new technologies like self-driving vehicles," writes Seeking Alpha, citing a (pay-walled) report on The Information. "Western Digital and Nvidia also plan to use the new chip design for some of their products," while Tesla "has joined the RISC-V Foundation and is considering using the tech in its new chip efforts."
MIT Technology Review adds that while Arm had hoped to bring their low-power/high performance processors to AI and self-driving cars, "The company that masterminded the processor inside your smartphone may find that a set of free-to-use alternative designs erode some of its future success."
MIT Technology Review adds that while Arm had hoped to bring their low-power/high performance processors to AI and self-driving cars, "The company that masterminded the processor inside your smartphone may find that a set of free-to-use alternative designs erode some of its future success."
We went through an era of tons and tons of CPUs. An open source CPU is very nice, and would be useful for it to be adopted, but is there something wrong about ARM based CPUs that they couldn't be used for this task? ARM is no slouch when it comes to performance, and it it is pretty thrifty when it comes to wattage.
Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?
Your phone is already spying on you. They don't need a open source processor for that.
I haven't looked but probably all you get is the layouts. You still have to bring the hardware. And making chips is possibly the pinnacle of humanity's technological achievements. It certainly depends on a veritable mountain of other tech. Replicating that is actually a science of its own. I'm with you though. Yes, we should have the blueprints to the machines too. We really should have auditable backdoor-free computing devices.
I've for a long time thought exactly that, what if we have to start from stone knives again and how do we get to chip fabs quickly? How can we do it at home, or at the small community level? I just never was (and still am not) in a position to map all the tech and come up with viable low-tech paths to do high-tech stuff like make chips. (Anybody spare a couple billion for a long term tech robustness research institute? Tim Cook maybe? I'm game to steer it.) Maybe^WCertainly not the latest process nodes, but for some things you really don't need that. In fact, if you can live with say mutt and troff (how I do my emails and letters) then a 68k is starting to look like overkill. It's because we want clickibunti that we need massive computing power just to emulate a shitty desktop. We are wasting a lot of resources just for the visual trappings.
For the rest, well, we don't actually need toasters or induction cooking or much of anything. We can get the creature comforts in other ways too. If we have to go back or start over, it'll be wood fires (and prompt extinction of forests given our current population levels). The prudent thing to do there is to work out something simpler, like the "hobo stove" or other high-efficiency cooking devices that you can fuel from non-fossil fuel sources that are themselves nicely simple, like paper-and-sawdust bricks or something. Cook a meal for four with just a few sticks. Boil water for a cup of tea with a single sheet of newsprint. That sort of thing.
There is quite a body of work on "appropriate technology", much of it gathered in the 1970s. It could probably do with an update or two. The real challenge is in the high-tech stuff, and for that you need some serious researching.
There likely isn't any information about how to machine the damned things probably just specs that only someone with a multi million dollar techno-jazz factory could create.
Yes, fabbing a CPU is a very expensive process. It’s not something you’re going to DIY at home and that was not what anyone working on RISC V claimed was possible. You’ll have to get a foundry to fab the chip for you.
Who has the say and responsibility for the design and in making trade-offs in design? There are going to be plenty to make, and different applications will need different things. Just a starter list includes things like: power requirements, instruction set and special instruction, performance, area, I/O, memory, self-test, coprocessors, design technology and tools, fab technology, supporting libraries and tool kits, and so on. Who will support design integration at the application level? Who wins when the performance hungry AI side runs up against the power and heat sensitive mobile device side?
That is before you get to manufacturing. Who will fab them? In what technology? Who will qualify parts? Who will stock the inventory? Who closes the loop between hardware defects and design?
Who will build and support the software tool chain? (Including the special tweaks needed for niche applications?)
Who will hold the patents? Copyrights?
Forming a grand coalition is the easy part. Getting something useful out of it is a much bigger challenge, especially when it comes down to actual hardware instead of just high level "standards".
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I've been working for a couple of years on Fedora and Linux on RISC-V and the "Seeking alpha" article is the strangest thing. The RISC-V Foundation offers BSD-licensed specs and multiple CPU designs (and a lot more besides). WD, Google, and many more are members. But they are not in any real sense "joining forces to develop a new open-source chip design". The design and chips are already out there, you can make your own FPGA or (if you're very rich) ASIC and have been able to for years. WD are going to switch all their hard drives to RISC-V soon. Google are likely interested because it could be used for their TPUs of their own design. "Joining forces" just means the companies subscribed to the Foundation for a very nominal fee, back-of-the-sofa loose change for these companies.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Take a look at how big companies develop Linux kernel modifications. It's not that hard. You do the things you want for yourself, and then you share those with the others.
Lay off the meth; your signal-to-noise ratio is showing.
Pro-tip: Look at what you're posting about before posting such nonsense.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
That is before you get to manufacturing. Who will fab them? In what technology? Who will qualify parts? Who will stock the inventory? Who closes the loop between hardware defects and design?
These cores will not be used as standalone CPU devices. They will be integrated in an application-specific SoC design that each company will have fabbed for themselves according to their own needs.
So where are they? I mean this is open source right, and they aren't just throwing that around as a buzzword so where is the website for it, where are the specs, where is the 'how to' articles or anything else.
I don't know. Impossible to find anything.
https://riscv.org/
AI driving cars. Using RISC. https://www.theverge.com/2017/... I bet Space-X is also using RISC for a lot of their control software. Last I worked on anti-lock train brakes, we were using 68k... Your ignorance of how things really move is sad...
Money is the root of all evil?
Uhh. This is not exactly new. The foundation has been around a few years and designs have already been made. Their easily identified website is https://riscv.org/.
Because you haven’t invented the process to do so yet?
This is Slashdot. No one has ever felt the need to be informed before ranting previously for years so why would anyone start doing that now?
The point of this is not for one central party to manufacture some canonical RISC-V CPU. The point is having a base design than be tweaked if need and then added to a SoC, etc. by the designer to be fabbed by a foundry. Just like how ARM does not actually manufacture it’s core but licenses ISAs and core designs to third parties.
The requirements and consequences are pretty different between:
>>make world
and
>>fab chip --with $$$$$
One of those is trivially and cheaply repeatable, variable, and testable. The other is not.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Please don't make abusive replies. They waste everyone's time.
They're both correct, and English is an open language so if you already observed a thousand examples of a construction that means you already have evidence of its use, and therefore its correctness.
Stop blathering like an ignoramus and learn you an English.
If you want rules, switch to French. They have rules. English only has style guides and known constructions.
This is just the chip design. We would still need ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, Intel (I would LOL if they released a board for a competing chip), etc, to provide a working platform to integrate these into. A standard socket, PGA or LGA, or soldered on to each board. Maybe we'll see them in a littany of SoC or SBC designs first, that seems much more likely honestly.
/* * pope1 */
Your point is well taken. Even so that only makes part of the problem go away. I don't see how one design is going to do it all even if you can mate it with different I/O, ram, etc. I doubt they can parameterize the design sufficiently to cover the range of uses this seems to be intended to cover. I expect there will have to be multiple variants to choose from, and the associated design support, etc.
But hey, if there is one thing we're short of its processor core IP. :|
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's not just spyware.
Alright, so you can have open source linux contributions from large companies.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is basically a patent troll with a sideline in silicon design. They never operate in good faith, and they have a long and inglorious track record of getting a standard that, surprise! they have a patent on, or simply using their patents to screw their competitors and collaborators with lawsuits. When they're not using their patents, they're just not serving users, they don't bother to innovate unless it's to squash their competition.
The reason why GSM wasn't a global standard for many years but CDMA stuck around? Qualcomm, because they got more patent revenue that way. ... many more
The reason why Android Wear sucks? Qualcomm.
Qualcomm, much more than any other large tech corporation with lawyers and patents, is toxic. An "open standard" with their involvement will have a trap.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
One design won’t do it all. That’s why people will take the base design and tweak it their specific application. Just like how Apple and Qualcomm take the base ARM64 ISA and make their own CPU designs.
Almost all cars are using RISC.
https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/da...
FPGAs, and the tools to compile code for them, verify the code, and program the FPGAs, is very closed-source.
English only has style guides and known constructions. ...
You should tell that the english teachers in germany. We got pestered with hundreds of rules
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
To me they have slightly different meanings, and the meaning here is closer to "based off" than to "based on". I probably still would have used "based on" were I writing it, but that's because of frequency of use, and because "based on" is less precise in meaning. "based off" means, to me, that a design (and *only* a design) is modified from another design. "based on" includes using one thing, of whatever nature, to support another. The idea here is geometric, rather a building block model, where you base an extension on something already present.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'll be damned... They're still using Power! Interesting link.
I thought Freescale/NXP were pushing designers toward the Kinetis series. I proposed using K60 and K64 parts for my company's new industrial DAQ project based on the long-term product life that comes with being used in the high-volume automotive world.
I'm an electrical engineer, and maybe a "doofus" but... The concepts of PLC and RISC are apples and oranges, completely orthogonal. RISC vs CISC was basically settled by the research that led to Hennesy and Patterson in "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" https://www.amazon.com/Compute... while PLC is pretty much a "language" used to express industrial data acquisition and control, but at a fairly high level and with what I consider to be limited resolution.
ARM generally makes nearly nothing on a CPU/SoC. Some were less than a penny (US) and the max were closer to a dime. Many companies, Intel, Apple, and such have paid their fee and they're done.
So exactly WTF was ARM expecting long run? ARM is very good at low power. Very, very good in fact. But high functioning isn't their forte. ARM core designs are slow moving beasties. If a company needs a faster solution they need to be as heavy into the solution as building their own 64bit ARM a full year before anyone else, e.g. apple.
RISC V will allow faster design cycles. RISC V will let those champing on the bit to move forward without their high demand sitting on ARM's low power bus. One doubts they will all agree to use the same version of the silicon, just as one wouldn't expect them to share an ARM solution.
Yes, fabbing a chip is somewhere between expensive and astronomical. OTOH, you can design your own medium size CPU and program it into a FPGA for $1000. Or a small one into a CPLD for $100. So yeah, you can build a working CPU in your home. Just not 1000 of them.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Because CPU's aren't made from sand. They are made from monocrystal silicon, high purity aluminum, highly toxic gases like silane, and a dozen other highly pure and hard to handle ingredients. Besides, what *can* nano-machines build?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Not stop functioning, that would be illegal. It will not support the newer instructions though. The Support Library will provide compatibility workarounds for a while, but Google will be able to discontinue support anytime they feel like so, har har har. ..
How very german.
That is open source for you: Either you use what other make, you convince others to make it or you make/modify it yourself.
It is up to you to succeed in communicating if that is your goal. If your goal is not to communicate, then yes, that is perfectly good prose of some sort of if you claim it has meaning to you.
Lattice ICE40 chips are being made now in Maker Spaces?
No, I think they are still produced in highly proprietary closed facilities.