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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.
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.
No, you dunce. We already have those kinds of controllers in hard-drives, GPUs, soundcards and so on and so forth, they've just mostly been ARM-based for now! The move to RISC-V is about cost-savings, since the companies won't have to pay for all the license-fees, but from the point of having "non-exposed, internal processors running secret unreplacable firmware doing unknown things" nothing has or is going to change as we are already there!