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ARM's Own Employees Complain About Anti-RISCV Website (theregister.co.uk)
lkcl writes: Phoronix and The Register have an insightful look into an effort by ARM that is reminiscent of Microsoft's "Get The Facts" campaign. RISC-V's design is a revamp of the RISC concept that is intended from the ground up to fix the mistakes and learn from the lessons of the past 30 years. Power efficiency is 40% better than ARM or Intel. Compressed instructions reduce I-cache misses by 20-25%, which is roughly comparable to the same performance that would be achieved by doubling the Instruction Cache size. Yet despite El Reg's insightful analysis,
all is not as it seems: on further investigation, some of ARM's criticism has merit, whilst some of it is clear out-and-out FUD from ARM that, being so critically dependent on free software, had its own employees complain so much that the site was pulled.
Also we cannot help but wonder which "Big Chip" company offered seven-figure salaries to try to shut down the IIT Madras Shakti Project. Most interesting however is the fact that ARM -- a $40 billion dollar company -- is rattled by RISC-V enough to use underhanded tactics, whilst Intel on the other hand is actually investing.
all is not as it seems: on further investigation, some of ARM's criticism has merit, whilst some of it is clear out-and-out FUD from ARM that, being so critically dependent on free software, had its own employees complain so much that the site was pulled.
Also we cannot help but wonder which "Big Chip" company offered seven-figure salaries to try to shut down the IIT Madras Shakti Project. Most interesting however is the fact that ARM -- a $40 billion dollar company -- is rattled by RISC-V enough to use underhanded tactics, whilst Intel on the other hand is actually investing.
I don't think I've ever read a more confusing summary. Clarifying that RISC-V isn't ARM's baby would have been a start. The subject of each sentence is also hard to decipher - is The Register's (do we have to call it "El Reg"? That's so twee) analysis about RISC-V, or about ARM's anti-RISC-V site? And so on.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I wouldn't say that. Companies like NVidia are doing a lot of work in designing cores that are made for deep learning and other types of specialty workflows where a general purpose CPU isn't as efficient or the amount of processing power needed is massive. Others like AMD have developed new interconnect technologies (they call it Infinity Fabric) that can be used to connect multiple small dies together on an interposer. This has massive ramifications as it means you can create massive dies in a much more cost-effective manner. We've also seen both Intel and AMD making moves towards APUs and with HBM (high bandwidth memory) it's eventually going to hit a point where x86 processors can become a SoC to that point that PCs become much more simplified. Maybe this doesn't have the wow-factor of some flashy new invention, but steady progress is often far more important than most of what people want to call "true" innovation.
RISC-V is also an ISA (instruction set architecture) which is not an actual chip implementation. It's very similar to ARM in that it allows for companies to develop their own implementations of the chip, much like how Apple, Samsung, NVidia, and Qualcomm all make their own cores. The only difference is that RISC-V doesn't cost anything to license. You'll still need to pay chip designers to create an implementation if you don't have an open implementation that's free to use and there's no guarantee that any free implementation fits the use case that you'd want to target. Even if it does, there's still no guarantee that someone's proprietary implementation doesn't have such significantly better performance that it's better just to pay the additional cost anyway.
ARM is scared of losing it's death grip over IoT and smartphones. Usually active FUD campaigns bely this real concern. One day ARM will have to come to grips with the fact that it will be toppled. ARM is about to repeat the same expensive mistakes that Microsoft did with its Get The Facts campaign.