Comment by mrbluecoat

3 months ago

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.

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mrbluecoat

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Joel_Mckay  3 months ago

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

blurbleblurble  3 months ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'd imagine the performance gap has almost nothing to do with RISC-V and everything to do with implementation.

  • Joel_Mckay  3 months ago

    Like everything in tech... the answer is "it depends": the barrel-shifter in ARM is considered energy-efficient. Also, most RISC design concepts are using more numerous simpler instructions at higher clock-rates, and doesn't rely on mystery microcode to pull off the same workloads as amd64 etc. ARM8/9 is quite good, but partly because a lot of the unused legacy chip features were stripped out.

    RISC-V had potential, but is still too fragmented... It is the value proposition to companies that is a problem, and in the current consumer market it will likely meet the same fate as PowerPC. =3

    "Why the Original Apple Silicon Failed"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tld91M_bcEI

    • snvzz  3 months ago

      >but is still too fragmented...

      Care to elaborate? What application processors are out there not following the application profiles?

      As far as I am aware, there is not even one.

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