Comment by fidotron

1 year ago

RISC-V has existed for over a decade and in that time no one has got close to building a competitive non microcontroller level CPU with it.

How long is this supposed to take?

How long until it is accepted that RISC-V looks like a semiconductor nerd snipe of epic proportion designed to divert energy away from anything that might actually work? If it was not designed for this it is definitely what it has achieved.

12 comments

fidotron

Reply
camel-cdr  1 year ago

The name RVA23 might give you a hint around which time the extensions required for high performance implementations to be viable were rougly standardized.

The absolutely essential bitmanip and vector extensions were just ratified at the end of 2021 and the also quite important vector crypto just in 2023.

  • fidotron  1 year ago

    So it took 10 years to ratify absolutely essential extensions?

    Somehow I suspect in 10 years there will be a new set of extensions promising to solve all your woes.

    Seriously, the way to do this is for someone to just go off and do what it takes to build a good CPU and for the ISA it uses to become the standard. Trying to do this the other way around is asking for trouble, unless sitting in committees for twenty years is actually the whole idea.

    • panick21_  1 year ago

      > So it took 10 years to ratify absolutely essential extensions?

      Essential for what? RISC-V was not just created for high performance of application cores.

      The first couple years RISC-V was mostly for university research work.

      Turning it into a fully capable alternative only started later and yes, that takes a number of years.

      > Somehow I suspect in 10 years there will be a new set of extensions promising to solve all your woes.

      Its about delivering the same as Intel/ARM and they have that now. Yes, in 10 years more extentions will exist, this is true for RISC-V and ARM and x86.

      > Seriously, the way to do this is for someone to just go off and do what it takes to build a good CPU and for the ISA

      No it doesn't happen that way because the company wouldn't do that wouldn't open source their ISA design. Or at least not historically.

      So a different path was taken to create and open standard and it worked out pretty well, even if it doesn't do what your imagination wants.