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."

Comments

What's so wrong about ARM?

[ctilsie242]

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?

Re:What's so wrong about ARM?

[lkcl]

Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?

there's two main aspects to that. firstly: RISC-V has learned from the past 30 years of RISC processor design mistakes, and is approximately half the area for an equivalent level of performance. that in turn means that RISC-V is HALF THE POWER of an equivalent ARM design.

secondly: ARM charges royalties for licensing their proprietary design, whereas anyone may adopt the *open* RISC-V design and, apart from needing to be fully conformant with the specification, will NOT be charged any royalties.

thirdly - and i'm following the development mailing lists so will be watching closely to see how this pans out: open design tends to have more eyes and more transparency (but the RISC-V Foundation still operates behind closed doors and a cognitively-dissonant Charter so it's not a panacea), so despite the flaws there is a higher chance that security flaws warned of by engineering will NOT be over-ridden by marketing executives.

so it's a triple whammy.

Re:What's so wrong about ARM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?

The problem that originally lead to creation of RISC-V is that ARM (the company) had a history of blocking university research based on ARM (the architecture). They'd let you theorize all you want, but create an actual implementation (e.g. FPGA) to test your theory, and ARM's lawyers would shut you down. Note: ARM certainly isn't unique in this -- Intel will also shut down researchers who create their own X86. The main difference is that X86 is such an awful architecture that nobody wants to do research with it!

Berkeley needed a "real" modern architecture to experiment with. A "toy" architecture wouldn't support the type of research they wanted to do. Since they couldn't use an existing commercial architecture, they decided to create their own, and RISC-V was the result. The fact that RISC-V may now have commercial applications is a bonus, not the reason for it's creation.

Bizarre article

[Richard W.M. Jones]

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.