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Nvidia, Western Digital Turn to Open Source RISC-V Processors (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum:
[W]hat's so compelling about RISC-V isn't the technology -- it's the economics. The instruction set is open source. Anyone can download it and design a chip based on the architecture without paying a fee. If you wanted to do that with ARM, you'd have to pay its developer, Arm Holding, a few million dollars for a license. If you wanted to use x86, you're out of luck because Intel licenses its instruction set only to Advanced Micro Devices. For manufacturers, the open-source approach could lower the risks associated with building custom chips.
Already, Nvidia and Western Digital Corp. have decided to use RISC-V in their own internally developed silicon. Western Digital's chief technology officer has said that in 2019 or 2020, the company will unveil a new RISC-V processor for the more than 1 billion cores the storage firm ships each year. Likewise, Nvidia is using RISC-V for a governing microcontroller that it places on the board to manage its massively multicore graphics processors.
Already, Nvidia and Western Digital Corp. have decided to use RISC-V in their own internally developed silicon. Western Digital's chief technology officer has said that in 2019 or 2020, the company will unveil a new RISC-V processor for the more than 1 billion cores the storage firm ships each year. Likewise, Nvidia is using RISC-V for a governing microcontroller that it places on the board to manage its massively multicore graphics processors.
license their tech to a Chinese company? At this point I think AMD is big enough and advanced (pun intended) enough to stand on their own. I'm sure they have to license patents from Intel, but last I checked that was required by law (that's kind of the point of patents) and I'm sure they've got their own patents to license.
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I'm all for open source anything, but the fact that Samsung, Apple, Broadcom and others aren't investing on that architecture must say something about how good/mature it is.
I think the article should say "[W]hat's so compelling about RISC-V isn't just the technology".
The instruction set is modern and tight, made to be easy to pipeline and scale. There are RISC-V chips that rival ARM in performance / watt at the same manufacturing process.
The ISA is modular so engineers could strip out the parts they don't need and get more power savings that way.
But I would not say that it is mature yet. There are important parts, such as the memory consistency model that I have not yet seen set in stone.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
The greater the return!
I'd like to see a multidisciplinary team take a look at software and hardware together and see if a bit of re-imagination can improve both. Security should be in there as well.
For instance, how about thinking about things like?
1. We divide presentation layers from computational layers, so why can't we load the presentation layers fully into the graphics core?
2. There is a lot of complex data binding and dependency objects and all the rest these days. Can the graphics core just be told where the source of indicator data is that resides in memory and let do its job?
3. Basically with 1 and 2 can we design things so that they are effectively decoupled and operating independently for most tasks? A lot of tasks today require hardware locking to avoid potentially bad things happening or even greater care, but sometimes simple producer + 1 or more consumer linking works, provided you have some buffering and provided you can prove your consumers _will_ keep up.
4. How do we address security with all that?
5. How does physical disk security fit into things? Maybe extend the SE linux ideas? This component is confined to these parts of these resources and it will stay in its box, by hardware, if possible.
I love the open source stuff. It just seems that improvements these days are incremental, and no one is really trying to take a step back, understand the big picture and perhaps take a few risks to try to get step change in say performance per watt.
I thought risc was the way of the future when it first came out, yet Intel dominates with their fairly complex architecture. Why and are the problems solvable? A quick review of Itanium seems to indicate that the magic compilers to make all the hype work never materialized to the extent expected. I do wonder if that will always be the case, since finding ways to reduce processor complexity are still very appealing...
So RISC-V's market is going to be mostly in non-exposed, internal processors running secret unreplacable firmware doing unknown things our GPUs and SSDs... Kinda like the Intel ME and AMD PSP. Are we supposed to feel good about that?
I find it ironic that the first thing that comes out of an open CPU design is more of the closed systems that supposedly RISC-V was designed to discourage. I don't think we can blindly apply the same approach to open hardware that was taken for open software, the economics of hardware production is very different than the economics of distributing software on the Internet.
soon due to the usual lack of progress open source projects face when they lack funding in research and development to improve substantially and the original developers vanish or their ideas stagnate?
"RISC architecture is gonna change everything"
If you want open hardware then you're going to have to buckle down and start designing and writing drivers for it yourself. Sandisk/AMD/Intel/NVIDIA/WesternDigital/Seagate/RAID manufacturers/Creative clearly don't give a shit about making open source hardware. Now many of their patents and methods have already expired so it should be possible to raid the patent libraries to make some pretty reasonable hardware, but the software is going to all have to be written from scratch as existing code is under copyright protection.
Why not SPARC?
Kriston
With gcc the code density is poor vs armcc. If someone writes a better compiler for it, that would be great, as for embedded work, code density is $.
Why do Qualcomm and Samsung use ARM for their mobile chips (Exynos and Snapdragon) instead of RISC-V? Superior performance? Price?
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I think this were mentioned in an earlier slashdot post, but here it is again since it seems relevant: https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...
their intent seems difficult to gauge though, even the sum they invested is up is an unknown, but I think when we look at what's happening each day - new spectre releases, patents lapsing, proliferation of ARM and so on - it looks more and more like a bad idea to base your entire fortune around a single processor.
to be more specific, I think going forward we'll see ISAs factor more and more into security decisions, especially as fpga stuff gets cheaper, and this could change the ecosystem up a lot. there was a recent-ish article in another thread about intel losing ground in the server market to ARM, so you could say the shift is already happening.
alternatives like RISC V, would stand to benefit a lot in this, though in which capacity and to what extent is hard to tell at the moment. It's worth noting ARM were scared enough to wage a smear campaign on RISC V recently, so at the very least the future may be interesting for awhile.
1. Pipeline: yes.
2. Superscalar: yes.
3. Out-of-order termination: yes.
4. EPIC: yes.
4.1 Tomasulo: yes.
4.2 Scoreboard: yes if it is necessary (e.g. more registers to be renamed)
5. Speculative execution: better no, because it heats much and could have risks of meltdown/spectre mitigations.
6. Caches: yes, larger and many.
There's an open source LEON core for SPARC, it's easy to make it radiation upset tolerant, etc.
sometime in the 2020's, or they will risk losing market.
Thy are also free to use AMD there is an existing expertise so it should be easier to use than something new.
It's outrageous you can copyright an instruction set. Its a language, and you shouldnt be able to copyright languages, protocols, etc. Didnt transmeta and several other companies implement x86 without paying Intel a fee? It seems the fee should only be for licensing Intels schematics. but if your going to use all of your own electronic designs it should be fine to support an existing ISA. ISAs are not difficult to implement. In fact you can create one in an hour. This certainly is not worth millions of dollars of fees. 99.9% of the effort to create your own CPU is in laying out the electronics, making the masks, and all of the difficulties of being able to fabricate the thing. Maybe I am missing something here but something does not make sense.
So RISC-V's market is going to be mostly in non-exposed, internal processors running secret unreplacable firmware doing unknown things our GPUs and SSDs... Kinda like the Intel ME and AMD PSP. Are we supposed to feel good about that?
Don't feel bad.
The Chinese are developing new CPUs based on the RISC-V architecture
Rumor has it that a few of those new CPUs may end up as accelerators for their up-coming exa-scale supercomputers