Comment by Chyzwar
7 hours ago
It is Chinese companies looking for ARM alternative that push this otherwise mediocre ISA.
It is possible that ARM based CPUs will start eating x86 market slowly. See snapdragon X2 and upcoming Nvidia CPU. Maybe in 10 years new computers will be ARM based and a lot of IoT will run on risc-5.
"It is Chinese companies looking for ARM alternative"
The V in RISC-V represents iteration of the ISA, over the last 46 years, most of which occurred in the US, mainly at Berkeley.
They push it to save a couple nickels per core on the ARM licenses, not out of nationalistic fervor.
And it is the Chinese doing it because virtually 100% of all chips are made in China and Taiwan.
That's not really how it works. There are only a few companies on the planet that are licensed to create their own cores that can run ARM instructions. This is an artificial constraint, though and at present China is (as far as I know) cut off from those licenses. Everyone else that makes ARM chips is taking the core design directly from ARM integrating it with other pieces (called IP) like IO controllers, power management, GPU and accelerators like NPUs to make a system on a chip. But with RISC-V lots of Chinese companies have been making their own core designs, that leads to flexibility with design that is not generally available (and certainly not cost effective) on ARM.
Your comment is appealing to fallacies such as it being old so it's good or that it was made by a prestigious university. It's not like those early iterations were commercially produced and they learned off of real world usage. For the people who criticize the ISA, saying that it is old will not change their mind.
Maybe. People are free to partake in whatever cognitive misadventures they wish. I merely cite the incontrovertible fact that Berkeley RISC predates essentially all of the modern economic history of China, and also the rise of ARM. It came from academe in the US, for better or worse, whether it's crap or the finest ISA ever, and for whatever purpose these US academics had or or have. That is all anyone can truthfully say about its pedigree. The rest is just bullshit from the internet.
Why "mediocre"? I've written production assembly language for a half-dozen different processor architectures and RISC-V is my favorite by far.
You should write an article on that explaining why you like it to the common man
SiFive, Tenstorrent, and other big RISC-V firms are not Chinese.
Really? Didn't China pirate the entire ARM China company and start spamming cores like Star1