Comment by Joel_Mckay
18 hours ago
Be honest, what does RISC-V offer that 10 year old AArch64 doesn't already provide?
RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
18 hours ago
Be honest, what does RISC-V offer that 10 year old AArch64 doesn't already provide?
RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
What does <open source anything> offer that trusty old <proprietary burden> doesn't already provide?
I would agree for FPGA soft-cpu the RISC-V is an obvious choice.
But in general, the next question will be which version did you deploy, and which cross-compiler do you use. All the documentation people search will have caveats, or simply form contradictory guidance.
The problem isn't the ISA, but the ill fated trap of trying to hit every use-case (design variant fragmentation.) ARM 6 made the same mistake, and ARM8/9 greatly consolidated around the 64 bit core design.
Indeed, an ISO standard may help narrow the project scope, but I doubt it can save the designs given the behavior some of its proponents have shown. =3
People complain about fragmentation, but I feel like they are missing the forest for the trees.
In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V.
I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others".
As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.
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While the sentiment is a bit harsh, the performance gap noted is real. RISC-V has a ways to go to catch up to ARM64 and then finally AMD64 but if the Apple M1 taught us anything, it's possible.
RISC-V shouldn't try to catch 40 years of spiral-development, but rather focus on something people can gather momentum around.
amd64 wasn't a great design, but provided a painless migration path for x86 developers to 64bit. Even Intel adopted this competitors architecture.
I like the company making a multi-core pseudo GPU card around RISC-V + DSP cores, but again copying NVIDIA bodged on mailbox style hardware is a mistake. It is like the world standardized around square-wheels as a latency joke or something... lol
Making low-volume bespoke silicon is a fools errand, and competing with a half-baked product for an established market is a failed company sooner or later.
I think people are confusing what I see with what I would like to see. An open ISA would be great, but at this point I can't even convince myself I'd buy a spool of such chips. =3
Less legal risk, ARM has grown litigious and wants a bigger piece of the pie.
IP costs real money, and consumers usually don't care how people split up their pies.
100% of a small pie is worth far less than a slice from a large pie. I've met people that made that logical error, and it usually doesn't end well. =3