I think he's kind of speaking past the original author. The original piece is basically about how the author doesn't think that RISC-V will take off outside embedded, because of some design decisions that lead to poor performance compared to ARM64 and because so much of the ISA being optional means that there's too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible. Meanwhile, this piece is mainly about how RISC-V is great for embedded because companies can build it into custom chips with specifically the functionality they need, and because of how cheap it is for low-end use cases since there's no license fees.
The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
The two authors also have a very different definition of what "high-end" means.
Dmitry is talking about high-end application processors that you might find in a mid-range or better laptop, smartphone or server. Armstrong Subero seems to think that anything larger than a "dirt cheap microcontroller" is high-end.
People shouldn't take this the wrong way, but the VexRISC-V cores in Baochip are not "high-end". They are basically as low-end as you can get while still meeting the modern definition of "application core". And that doesn't matter, because being high-end application SoC is not Baochip's design criteria. These cores are actually pretty decent for Baochip's criteria.
The VexRISC-V are implementing the exact style of "classic-RISC" microarchitecture that RISC-V is optimised for. It's basically the optimal niche for RISC-V, before any of the problems start showing up.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone express the opinion that RISC-V can't easily cover the "dirt cheap microcontroller" to "low-end application processor" range, even stretching up into "mid-range application processor". Just that it's really fighting an uphill battle if it ever wants to compete with high-end application processors (and that it's going to struggle in the low-range/mid-range application market because of that).
To add to what you said, I don't see any big issues with high-end prosessors and licenses.
Anyone who spends $200 million to develop a completely new high-end processor microarchitecture every 3 to 5 years is not going to complain about an ARM license too much. You get freedom with $$.
Interesting. So I've seen a lot of reviews of RISC-V machines and they seem to be a decade or more behind in terms of performance.
I always thought that was a case of "the tech is still catching up",[0] but it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations?
If so... I heard China was investing heavily in RISC-V, which implies that either they're going to have to settle for permanently crippled perf, or find a way around the issues.
--
[0] Making chips is an extremely high tech process with decades of trial and error and proprietary secrets, so this would be the logical explanation to me regardless of architecture. But I'm not hardware guy, so I'd love to hear more about this!
x86 is a horrible architecture, but most of the modern high performance processors are x86. They're only now getting around to making comparatively performant ARM chips.
Not having decently performing risc-v chips right now doesn't mean anything other than nobody spent enough time and money on accomplishing that.
the current highest performance RISC-V systems you can buy off a shelf are equivalent to a raspberry pi 5 so they're not terribly behind. in terms of IPC, currently available RISC-V cores are already basically on par with Zen 3 and Apple M1 from what i understand and Jim Keller believes that RISC-V will be the one that leads the way for raw performance.
> it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations?
This has always been true, it is just this is one of those projects that gets some people very emotionally invested so such discussions do not happen in public.
See also Android, rust, webassembly, webgpu and so on.
Intel and AMD have proven that if you throw enough money at the problem, you can make fast microarchitectures despite a flawed ISA, and in many ways RISC-V is less flawed than x86. The things we are debating here are more along the lines of minor nitpicks.
The main roadblock to the existence of fast RISC-V cores is the entrenchment of large x86 and arm ecosystems.
the main problem with RISC-V is also the main selling point: there is no single owner company behind steering development and making sweeping decisions
how will that pan out over the long term is really unclear and the reality is performance is actually catching up quickly
Different RISC-V dialects might as well be as different from each other as English is from German. Sure, the cognates, family the resemblance, and common(-ish) alphabet make some things easier, but if you're shipping a manual, you still need to do it both in English and auf Deutsch unless you rely on machine translation.
So it is with the family of mutually incomprehensible ISAs called RISC-V.
Yeah I know this mess in PowerPC. There is IBM Power, there is MPC5xx ISA, there is VLE and and several other dialects. Some processors are doing those some doing others, some needs bit to signal if program runs VLE... just crazy chaos.
> Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway
The benefit is a unified toolchain. Make a chip, get the entire software toolchain for free.
In the past if you made your own chip you had to write your own assembler, compiler, debugger, etc. Many manufacturers forked gcc but of course it's still a lot of work and the license isn't great (for them, not the user).
This universal compiler toolchain is massive benefit for both the chip makers and the end user.
The huge number of companies building RISC-V chips and really crazy optimizations that they are doing in all kinds of spaces are a very real counterweight to your notion.
And RISC-V is just starting here with shoestring design and fab budget. Wait till all engineering teams really adopt it like Tenstorrent and NextSilicon and so on.
> The huge number of companies building RISC-V chips and really crazy optimizations that they are doing in all kinds of spaces are a very real counterweight to your notion.
I assume this is addressing
> and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
If so, could you point at specific SBCs that beat ARM SBC perf?
I don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part".
I don't get how both things can be true. The cost to ship something to Trinidad and Tobago has nothing to do with whether it's ARM or RISC-V; shipping the same weight of either kind of chips should cost exactly the same amount. Yes, maybe the chip cost itself of a particular ARM-based model is $0.15 while the equivalent RISC-V chip costs $0.10, but if the issue (for him and other people who live outside US/Europe) is that shipping costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than the thing being shipped, that chip-cost difference becomes irrelevant.
I think he does make a great point about how fragmentation does give you better optionality: ARM is sort of like cable TV where you have a small number of product categories that each bundle a particular set of features, whereas with RISC-V you design something bespoke that does exactly what you need and nothing more. But again, this isn't going to affect shipping costs.
He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.
Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.
The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.
Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.
A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.
I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, that does sound like Claude.
But it doesn't change the question; I still expect authors to be responsible for the meaning of what they post, regardless of whether they fully wrote it themselves or not. Yes, I know, silly me.
In addition to what you wrote... what does China use? One could argue that the factories there have very low cost of shipping + economies of scale - they order thousands of units, if not tens of thousands.
Then probably RISC-V being "open" license is the key to its success, even if the architecture itself is weird.
> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings
Yet earlier:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
> I can pick up H417s on the official WCH store on Aliexpress with free shipping and no verification hullabalu.
I think the point is that anyone can make these chips, so there are Chinese sellers who just throw them in a padded envelope and send them out without bothering with all the stuff "serious" vendors do. And because they're cheap enough, if doesn't matter if some get lost in the mail.
Sure, but a quick search of AliExpress shows that you can get lots of ARM chips from them too, and I assume those are without any "verification hullabalu" as well, no?
I’d really like an explanation here if the author is reading. And how does shipping cost scale with quantity? Can you get that to be small per unit on big orders?
Hi there, shipping has a floor and then it scales, but it scales far slower than the order does.... so if you buy like one resistor from DigiKey or Mouser, that starts around $60, a hundred resistors costs about the same if you add chips and weight and it climbs from there, but $60 is the floor no matter how small the order....
So per unit shipping collapses with quantity, which is why the part price matters more here, not less. The fixed cost forces you to buy deep, and only the cheap part lets you buy deep. At a dollar a part, 1000 units is a $1060 order nobody here is placing... at ten cents it is $160, and then there are 1000 parts sitting in Trinidad that nobody else has to pay $60 to reach, so you can have enough for a small product run..keep in mind we also currently have US dollar shortage, so you only get allocated a certain amount of US per quarter....
I should also have been explicit that those figures are the Western channels like DigiKey, Mouser, courier from LCSC. WCH officially sells direct on AliExpress with free shipping, which runs on postal consolidation rates that do not price by how remote you are. But that channel is a game of chance. Sometimes things just never come, there is no ARM equivalent either. I cannot buy an STM32 from ST with free shipping to Trinidad, and I cannot trust the aftermarket parts because some of them are fakes, and some vendors do not have this country in their shipping list at all....
The part I care about most is that at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. Learning embedded means killing chips, and at a dollar a part a teacher flinches, cause 1 US dollar is about 7 dollars here, and starts supervising instead of letting people find out. And the same goes for me, at ten cents I can experiment and still ship with the part I experimented on....
I love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue:
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
Is this comment on shipping costs from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh based on your experience? If there is a less expensive way then share the approach to help others :)
It could be bureocratic barriers. For example, Turkey recently changed importing laws so that anything(even stuff sent to you for free) from outside the country is subject to tariffs & import costs. Importing a cheap component worth 1$ costs like 300$.
i don't know how trustworthy rateships.com is, but according to them shipping costs to nigeria and trinidad are similar. and as for the last mile, the cost probably goes up because local shipping is rather unsafe (higher rate of theft of packages).
I am in Asia, this means nothing, it's the largest continent on earth. I don't pay as much for shipping as the author does, but his struggles are nevertheless relatable: most sellers refuse to ship here, most of those who do want dozens and dozens of dollars for it, and some (few, usually Chinese) sellers save the situation from being completely hopeless.
In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
I disagree with some points in "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better".
For example, author claims that saving and restoring all registers in interrupt handler takes too long. But this can be solved alternatively, for example: split register set for use in interrupt and normal code. Or simply add two register banks and allow switching between them (assuming interrupts are not re-enterable). But author claims that ARM is better because it has a "store multiple registers" instruction. It wouldn't help because storing multiple registers still requires multiple bus cycles, and microcontroller probably has a 32-bit bus and no cache, so saving N registers requires N memory cycles - no matter, is it done with a single instruction (ARM), or with multiple (RISC-V). And implementing this ARM instruction makes the core more complicated with little benefit.
As for 3 instructions for array access, in a simple loop a compiler can convert index access to pointer increment.
The real weak points of RISC-V are:
- no trap on integer overflow and invalid FP results . Overflows cause vulnerabilities
- no optimizations for fast context switch, which is required for dumping legacy unsafe monolithic kernels, especially in age of AI actively searching for vulns
> He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists. This is almost satirical.
His criticisms are entirely valid, because why can't the the thing that has a free spec and will likely dominate that space ... also be good too? Can't we have all the nice things?
Maybe. I'm not sure if the original author's intent was to say how risc-v could be better or to say it is bad and people should use other (proprietary) ISAs instead.
Before this, the author has never recommended others stay away from RISC-V, just stated their own distaste for it and a personal preference to use any other ISA if given a choice.
Yeah the complaints in the original article are valid, but it's like complaints about Android or iOS. There are plenty of valid complaints against either, but neither is strictly better than the other.
I don't think the Author disagree with what the original article wrote. If anything everything he said seems to reassert what the original article intended to state.
And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line.
"You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."
Though it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
>He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists.
>This is almost satirical.
That's all that needs to be said.
It's like comparing Unity and Godot. Unity is better in every single way but one, you have to license it from a very poorly ran company.
You don't "own" your games, they ship with black box spyware. The pricing for using it can change from day to day.
I swear the Unity C level employs a Magic 8 Ball and consults it for key management decisions.
If you need to edit the Unity Engine source code your looking at a secret additional licensing fee which is certainly unaffordable for hobbyist and most indies.
Vs Godot which is completely free under the MIT license.
Everything about the above can be said for ARM as well.
RISC-V is free for everyone to play with. If you think it sucks you can always fork it and jerryrig it to work on existing hardware.
If you have money you can even get custom hardware for your forked RISC-V.
I very much enjoyed reading this article, I'm optimistic in seeing what OPs students come up with. This is life changing technology that's essentially available to all.
I'm not a professional game maker. But having used unity in anger in the past I found Godot a breath of fresh air. What unity really wins with is the unity asset store.
Which may actually be a good analogy.
One thing I've seen rarely discussed is existing expertise/experiance, existing varification/tooling and existing quality reference implementations.
Arm wins in all of the above over RISC-V currently, if you have the money to license from/work with Arm.
I lost the thread of his argument when he brought up the shipping expense:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
then follows with:
> the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings.
When shipping is so expensive, doesn't the difference between $1 and $.10 unit cost become less relevant?
I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.
My perspective using Nix is that it's hardly worth standardizing ISAs. Recompiling software is easy and we should have a Cambrian explosion of different designs.
This is especially good if one scopes out a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA.
I disagree, compiler optimization and software ecosystem in general already take a really really really long time to build, and I think it'll take longer without a standardized low-level binary interface i.e. ISA to enable rapid distribution.
And the approach you mentioned here:
> a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA
I think this is basically WebAssembly and PTX, and one may argue, Java bytecode. Yet look at how much efforts and time it took for WASM runtimes and JVMs to actually produce performant machine code (the "last bit per ISA" you mentioned) for just a couple of architectures! (e.g. X86 and ARM). And I wouldn't surprised if NVIDIA pour even more money on building optimization pipeline from PTX to each of their different uArchs.
What exactly does a bespoke ISA buy you? What will justify hundreds of engineers writing a new good one & working through the compiler support?
I bet it would be pretty easy for a user to interoperate between 67 different drafts of the HTTP spec once they were all written, validated, and library implementations coded. But what would that Cambrian explosion of API revs actually get you?
An explosion of ISAs means the available talent for writing optimizing compilers will be stretched much more thinly. Unpopular ISAs will have slow, buggy codegen, and the popular ones will suffer somewhat, too.
"Now price the same journey on the other side, forget x86-64 and that duopoly, patent minefield, with multi-thousand dollar debug probes; we'll take a look at ARM."
The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.
" That is a better reason than elegance. and I want to tell Mr Grinberg, that the word priviledge he tosses around in his article also extends beyond the ISA depending on where you are in the world."
Grinberg is an emigre from Ukraine, which isn't the most privileged place in the world. In fact his research articles go deeper than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.
There are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.
Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. <32nm). My project: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about
"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."
What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
High shipping costs are the reason why many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America usually have freight forwarders They locally market themselves as package lockers, po boxes or online shopping companies. It turns out the expensive shipping cost doesn't scale linearly with package size or weight. The expensive shipping cost is a base price, and only rises slowly with package weight and size.
So, these freight forwarders rent a warehouse in the US, an LLC in the US for paying rent, and give away the address of the warehouse to their customers locally. Customers use the address when shopping online and their packages are dropped off at the warehouse. Then they employ people in the US to collect customer packages in the US into large bags, which are then shipped to the destination country via DHL.
DHL does charge the exorbitant shipping to third world country fees of 35 to 60 to 200 dollars that people here complain about. These fees are the base price for shipping, no matter how small or light the package is.
Then, to recover the fees, packages are handed over to customers at a minimum of 2.50 dollars per pound, per package.
For the business to work, income from these packages has to exceed the shipping cost. In Panama, you can probably fit 100 average packages into a 25 pound bag. That bag costs like 75 dollars to ship from the US to Panama. Then you make 250 dollars when people collect the packages. Local customers trade speed for cost, trading the 35 dollar base shipping price for 2.50 dollars and an extra week of lead time to wait for collection to complete in the US. They also don't have to go to the airport to pick up their packages since the business is ideally close to their house.
Businesses like Temu ship directly from china via companies such as PRS logistics and J&T express so their shipping costs to third world countries are lower and can thus bypass freight forwarders entirely so freight forwarders only remain for items sold within the US, where shipping to third world countries has a base price of at least 35 dollars, and whenever shipping to your country costs that much as a base price, even if it ships from China, or when a business only offers shipping to or within the US.
Sometimes, temu is more expensive than a Freight forwarder, but the user is freed from having to handle any logistics like using a particular address and choosing and registering with a package locker and travelling to pick up packages there and the shipping price remains under 10 dollars. However you still have to use a Freight forwarder for items over 120 dollars such as laptops and some car parts because temu doesn't carry those. Freight forwarding is also done in the exact way described above in China instead of the US because websites like taobao rarely offer overseas shipping. Again employing people in china and renting warehouses near airports there. Freight forwarders also offer marine freight instead of the default air freight.
Of course, renting a warehouse and employing people in the US is expensive by local standards. Worker pay alone is around 1600 dollars vs 600 locally. So, there are only a few freight forwarders which often offer b2b, and then package lockers use their sevices. To the end customer there is no distinction between a package locker and freight forwarder. Some freight forwarders also offer B2C package locker services, others are B2B only.
For example nelcon cargo, Uno express, airbox, mail boxes etc are vertically integrated because they are both B2B and B2C, cft cargo is B2B only. most package lockers do not do freight forwarding themselves and use a B2B service for freight forwarding, the package locker only offers proximity and thus convenience to neighborhood customers. Air freight via Miami international airport is the default, and most freight forwarder warehouses are located near this airport. In China, the bottleneck is not price, but speaking Chinese, so it is often run by locals of Chinese descent and is more niche than shipping from the US. This also means that taobao has a lower shipping volume and thus a smaller local market.
Buyee and Zen market, so called proxy services, are very similar to freight forwarders but the service is allowing foreigners overseas to purchase in Japan because most japanese companies do not offer overseas shipping. And there are a few freight forwarders in china as well.
This blog post is very defensive and argumentative, which I guess is fair considering Dmitry's post is similarly inflammatory, but most of it was really not convincing:
> Simply put, the things a high-end CPU needs are diametrically opposed to the things a small cost-saving microcontroller core needs.
> The conclusion he draws is that no single ISA can serve both ends, and that RISC-V fans are fooling themselves, in theory the premise is true. The conclusion does not follow, and I can show you why from three parts sitting on my desk as we speak.
> CH32V003. This is the cheap "RV32EC" with sixteen registers, no multiplier, no divider, machine mode only,
> CH32H417. A dual core MCU that is unmatched in performance to price point and is at the higher end of the MCU line
> Baochip. A VexRISC-V with an MMU built around a stack thats open from silicon to os Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC for High Assurance Applications
Uh, which one of these is a datacenter server cpu? Or a workstation cpu? Or at least a developer laptop cpu? How about a Raspberry Pi 4 level SBC (supporting latest ubuntu and fedora releases, driving a display that runs a browser and plays video ...)
There's a lot of angry indignation but it seems obvious that Dmitry is quite right about this.
But I found this is where this blog post starts making a lot of sense:
> Has anyone tried adding an MMU to a Cortex-M? The physical tradeoffs are real, the difference is that with RISC-V, the ISA owner does not decide for you where that boundary must be drawn. If you want virtual memory on ARM you license a Cortex-A instead, which is a different core family, a different profile, a different negotiation, and a different royalty.
> Compare what happened with Baochip. The RISC-V privileged specification defines supervisor mode and Sv32 paging as optional things an implementation may provide. VexRISC-V is an open core, somebody added an MMU to it. bunnie built a chip around it and runs a microkernel with real process isolation on it
Yeah, that is a good point. We're still in the low-end specialty realm, but that is real interesting advantage for RISC-V, a good reason for it to exist.
As for shipping to Trinidad and Tobago ... this post is trying too hard to turn this into moral issue, but it seems a bit random (OrangePi cost $30 and shipped free? you can also get arm-based and stuff from the same places), and the vast majority of people don't live on semi-remote islands, it doesn't make sense to consider this kind of accessibility above all else, and it's strange to blame Dmitry for not thinking of you here.
the author just focused on his personal experiences regarding RISC-V and what he's been able to see himself as an embedded developer. there's already RISC-V SBCs that are on par with the Raspberry Pi 5 and in terms of IPC the best RISC-V cores are only lagging 5 years or less behind the best x86 and ARM cores.
A fun fact about ChatGPT and its ilk is the final RL polishing of the responses was outsourced to Nigeria and other places with cheap labor, so the patterns you’re picking up in the article aren’t that the author sounds like ChatGPT, it’s that ChatGPT sounds like the author.
Same reason the southern accent has overlaps with west African dialects.
I read the "They Should Have Known Better" article and forgot it. I've seen this before. I know it's hot air and does not matter, and I can't afford to worry about things that don't matter.
When I say I've seen this before, I'm talking about ancient history: controversies so old and so laughable that they've been forgotten. When, for example, AMD handed the world AMD64/X86_64, the same things were said: fragmentation, legacy+flawed ISA, etc. That has not aged well, and "They Should Have Known Better" won't either.
The "fragmentation" argument has no merit. The jumble of extension names and profiles in RISC-V are, in fact, direct evidence that RISC-V is succeeding: it's the RISC-V ecosystem aggressively, collaboratively and successfully tackling pain points and solving them. This is what RISC-V is supposed to be doing, and it's doing it, and empires are being built on it.
Take this part: "The existence of CLIC and various proprietary 'fast IRQ' / auto-stacking extensions is an additional indictment."
CLIC is miraculous. It's an advanced embedded interrupt controller, and it's wonderful: it brings the equivalent of ARM's NVIC to RISC-V, except better. You can implement an extremely efficient scheduler that guarantees deadlock-free concurrency: bare-metal, real-time, hardware-accelerated "Fearless Concurrency," on an MCU with no RTOS![1] Its appeal is so great that, despite still being a draft spec, the leading RISC-V MCU designers are adopting it. Espressif's ESP32-S31 has it, for example. The chaotic emergence of this awesome thing is what is condemned as an "indictment."
Speaking of ESP32-S31, it's going to be a monster when silicon becomes available in quantity. This RV Embedded writing mentions MMUs a lot. Guess what? The S31 has an Sv32 MMU. It can run Linux. Not μClinux. Real Linux. It's already been done twice (that I know of) on the Espressif eval boards. People like Armstrong Subero are going to change the world with it.
That's the froth of RISC-V. The ground is shaking, and the peanut gallery of ISA wizards has no power over it. In a few years, after RISC-V has lain waste to our world of proprietary ISAs and Western IP regime rent seeking, "They Should Have Known Better" will look as silly to everyone as it already looks to me.
Just an unlucky spawn point. We need to focus on ourselves. "oh no shipping to some remote island is expensive compared to NYC that has next day free on everything" Well, duh.
It's a distasteful take to be sure. But, what is GP supposed to do?
Frankly I'd rather be told that than the other common but tired SV-resident take of "just hustle, bro, stop sleeping, hustle hustle hustle. Learn to code, take loans from friends and family. Doesn't matter that you're born in a shithole, I was born in a median family myself, we only had one car and we rented our house!!! Just gotta work for it, everybody can achieve it. Those who don't, are clearly not working hard enough."
Naïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.
yo this is actually some really fire reading. i had to read it twice then go back and read the original that he's responding to here. i feel full of wonder right now seeing people who are this deep into compsci debating merits in the marketplace of ideas, there's just so much going on globally with computing that i never even get to see. super fascinating to read about the different constraints at play here even the global socioeconomic ones and how they apply to the chip world in general. it sounds like risc-v's real play is democratizing access to the entire embedded stack
I think he's kind of speaking past the original author. The original piece is basically about how the author doesn't think that RISC-V will take off outside embedded, because of some design decisions that lead to poor performance compared to ARM64 and because so much of the ISA being optional means that there's too much fragmentation to make binary distribution feasible. Meanwhile, this piece is mainly about how RISC-V is great for embedded because companies can build it into custom chips with specifically the functionality they need, and because of how cheap it is for low-end use cases since there's no license fees.
The only real point of contention I see between the two is that this piece goes on to talk about how it's a selling point that RISC-V can be used for both low-end 10 cent microcontrollers, and high-end multi-core processors running Linux. Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway, and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
The two authors also have a very different definition of what "high-end" means.
Dmitry is talking about high-end application processors that you might find in a mid-range or better laptop, smartphone or server. Armstrong Subero seems to think that anything larger than a "dirt cheap microcontroller" is high-end.
People shouldn't take this the wrong way, but the VexRISC-V cores in Baochip are not "high-end". They are basically as low-end as you can get while still meeting the modern definition of "application core". And that doesn't matter, because being high-end application SoC is not Baochip's design criteria. These cores are actually pretty decent for Baochip's criteria.
The VexRISC-V are implementing the exact style of "classic-RISC" microarchitecture that RISC-V is optimised for. It's basically the optimal niche for RISC-V, before any of the problems start showing up.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone express the opinion that RISC-V can't easily cover the "dirt cheap microcontroller" to "low-end application processor" range, even stretching up into "mid-range application processor". Just that it's really fighting an uphill battle if it ever wants to compete with high-end application processors (and that it's going to struggle in the low-range/mid-range application market because of that).
To add to what you said, I don't see any big issues with high-end prosessors and licenses.
Anyone who spends $200 million to develop a completely new high-end processor microarchitecture every 3 to 5 years is not going to complain about an ARM license too much. You get freedom with $$.
Interesting. So I've seen a lot of reviews of RISC-V machines and they seem to be a decade or more behind in terms of performance.
I always thought that was a case of "the tech is still catching up",[0] but it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations?
If so... I heard China was investing heavily in RISC-V, which implies that either they're going to have to settle for permanently crippled perf, or find a way around the issues.
--
[0] Making chips is an extremely high tech process with decades of trial and error and proprietary secrets, so this would be the logical explanation to me regardless of architecture. But I'm not hardware guy, so I'd love to hear more about this!
x86 is a horrible architecture, but most of the modern high performance processors are x86. They're only now getting around to making comparatively performant ARM chips.
Not having decently performing risc-v chips right now doesn't mean anything other than nobody spent enough time and money on accomplishing that.
the current highest performance RISC-V systems you can buy off a shelf are equivalent to a raspberry pi 5 so they're not terribly behind. in terms of IPC, currently available RISC-V cores are already basically on par with Zen 3 and Apple M1 from what i understand and Jim Keller believes that RISC-V will be the one that leads the way for raw performance.
> it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations?
This has always been true, it is just this is one of those projects that gets some people very emotionally invested so such discussions do not happen in public.
See also Android, rust, webassembly, webgpu and so on.
No.
Intel and AMD have proven that if you throw enough money at the problem, you can make fast microarchitectures despite a flawed ISA, and in many ways RISC-V is less flawed than x86. The things we are debating here are more along the lines of minor nitpicks.
The main roadblock to the existence of fast RISC-V cores is the entrenchment of large x86 and arm ecosystems.
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the main problem with RISC-V is also the main selling point: there is no single owner company behind steering development and making sweeping decisions
how will that pan out over the long term is really unclear and the reality is performance is actually catching up quickly
Different RISC-V dialects might as well be as different from each other as English is from German. Sure, the cognates, family the resemblance, and common(-ish) alphabet make some things easier, but if you're shipping a manual, you still need to do it both in English and auf Deutsch unless you rely on machine translation.
So it is with the family of mutually incomprehensible ISAs called RISC-V.
Yeah I know this mess in PowerPC. There is IBM Power, there is MPC5xx ISA, there is VLE and and several other dialects. Some processors are doing those some doing others, some needs bit to signal if program runs VLE... just crazy chaos.
> Personally I don't see the benefit of this since you're going to have to recompile your software anyway
The benefit is a unified toolchain. Make a chip, get the entire software toolchain for free.
In the past if you made your own chip you had to write your own assembler, compiler, debugger, etc. Many manufacturers forked gcc but of course it's still a lot of work and the license isn't great (for them, not the user).
This universal compiler toolchain is massive benefit for both the chip makers and the end user.
The huge number of companies building RISC-V chips and really crazy optimizations that they are doing in all kinds of spaces are a very real counterweight to your notion.
And RISC-V is just starting here with shoestring design and fab budget. Wait till all engineering teams really adopt it like Tenstorrent and NextSilicon and so on.
> The huge number of companies building RISC-V chips and really crazy optimizations that they are doing in all kinds of spaces are a very real counterweight to your notion.
I assume this is addressing
> and since all the RISC-V SBCs I'm aware of have significantly worse performance and efficiency than comparably priced ARM SBCs.
If so, could you point at specific SBCs that beat ARM SBC perf?
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> really crazy optimizations that they are doing
Any examples of this?
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I don't really understand the author's conclusions about cost and shipping, and how RISC-V is cheaper and more accessible to people outside the US and Europe. He first talks about how getting $1 worth of chips can cost $60-$200 in shipping for him due to his location... but then by the end claims that RISC-V gives him "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part".
I don't get how both things can be true. The cost to ship something to Trinidad and Tobago has nothing to do with whether it's ARM or RISC-V; shipping the same weight of either kind of chips should cost exactly the same amount. Yes, maybe the chip cost itself of a particular ARM-based model is $0.15 while the equivalent RISC-V chip costs $0.10, but if the issue (for him and other people who live outside US/Europe) is that shipping costs are orders of magnitude more expensive than the thing being shipped, that chip-cost difference becomes irrelevant.
I think he does make a great point about how fragmentation does give you better optionality: ARM is sort of like cable TV where you have a small number of product categories that each bundle a particular set of features, whereas with RISC-V you design something bespoke that does exactly what you need and nothing more. But again, this isn't going to affect shipping costs.
He's saying that shipping from the big western parts suppliers (Digikey, Mouser, Segger) costs a lot of money. When ordering from AliExpress or Crowd Supply he just gets the cheap postal rates which from China are free. It is very likely a good chunk of the overhead from western part suppliers has to do with export controls and risk aversion.
Aliexpress doesn't do any ID verification hassle. This is all an argument more about distribution and shipping. RISK-V is going to win because getting the parts is insanely cheap and without overhead.
The "fix" is probably Digikey, Mouser, and Segger need to just let buyers check a box where they assume all liability and parts are just thrown in the mail and forgot about - something aliexpress is great at doing.
Is the only source for ARM chips the big Western parts suppliers? If not, and you can get them from AliExpress or Crowd Supply, then, again, there's no difference in shipping between ARM and RISC-V chips.
A quick search for "arm chip" on AliExpress shows lots of results, so I don't think your argument refutes anything I said.
Aliexpress doesn't just sell RISC-V parts... I've purchased dozens of STM32, GD32, nrf52 parts from Aliexpress and LCSC.
> "an architecture that arrives in my country at ten cents a part"
This is 100% written by Claude. I've seen this sentence structure hundreds of times per day. That might be your answer.
I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, that does sound like Claude.
But it doesn't change the question; I still expect authors to be responsible for the meaning of what they post, regardless of whether they fully wrote it themselves or not. Yes, I know, silly me.
In addition to what you wrote... what does China use? One could argue that the factories there have very low cost of shipping + economies of scale - they order thousands of units, if not tens of thousands.
Then probably RISC-V being "open" license is the key to its success, even if the architecture itself is weird.
He says:
> From that position, the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings
Yet earlier:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
Seems to me that the difference between a 10c chip and a $1 chip are a rounding error when the shipping cost dominates so much?
He explains the difference here:
> I can pick up H417s on the official WCH store on Aliexpress with free shipping and no verification hullabalu.
I think the point is that anyone can make these chips, so there are Chinese sellers who just throw them in a padded envelope and send them out without bothering with all the stuff "serious" vendors do. And because they're cheap enough, if doesn't matter if some get lost in the mail.
Sure, but a quick search of AliExpress shows that you can get lots of ARM chips from them too, and I assume those are without any "verification hullabalu" as well, no?
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I’d really like an explanation here if the author is reading. And how does shipping cost scale with quantity? Can you get that to be small per unit on big orders?
Hi there, shipping has a floor and then it scales, but it scales far slower than the order does.... so if you buy like one resistor from DigiKey or Mouser, that starts around $60, a hundred resistors costs about the same if you add chips and weight and it climbs from there, but $60 is the floor no matter how small the order....
So per unit shipping collapses with quantity, which is why the part price matters more here, not less. The fixed cost forces you to buy deep, and only the cheap part lets you buy deep. At a dollar a part, 1000 units is a $1060 order nobody here is placing... at ten cents it is $160, and then there are 1000 parts sitting in Trinidad that nobody else has to pay $60 to reach, so you can have enough for a small product run..keep in mind we also currently have US dollar shortage, so you only get allocated a certain amount of US per quarter....
I should also have been explicit that those figures are the Western channels like DigiKey, Mouser, courier from LCSC. WCH officially sells direct on AliExpress with free shipping, which runs on postal consolidation rates that do not price by how remote you are. But that channel is a game of chance. Sometimes things just never come, there is no ARM equivalent either. I cannot buy an STM32 from ST with free shipping to Trinidad, and I cannot trust the aftermarket parts because some of them are fakes, and some vendors do not have this country in their shipping list at all....
The part I care about most is that at ten cents I can hand a student a part they are allowed to destroy. Learning embedded means killing chips, and at a dollar a part a teacher flinches, cause 1 US dollar is about 7 dollars here, and starts supervising instead of letting people find out. And the same goes for me, at ten cents I can experiment and still ship with the part I experimented on....
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I love the article, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes. However there's just one issue:
> The students I want to teach are in the same position, and so are the ones in Nigeria and Bangladesh
It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh. These two countries are all on global trade routes (both supply and demand) and the expensive last mile delivery costs are fairly low there too.
This is a bay area centric take on a non bay area centric take.
The typical bay area centric take has the following vibe:
1. I am among the group of most open minded people
2. I admit mistakes, but I don't change my view, that means I may make the same mistakes next time on a different concrete cases
3. Morally I am among the least corrupted
4. I work for the moderately morally questionable firms with nice paychecks, but my moral views are not tainted a bit
5. I never think on the other's perspectives
As exemplified in the following series of essays
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-foothills-of-bay-area-h...
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Is this comment on shipping costs from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh based on your experience? If there is a less expensive way then share the approach to help others :)
It could be bureocratic barriers. For example, Turkey recently changed importing laws so that anything(even stuff sent to you for free) from outside the country is subject to tariffs & import costs. Importing a cheap component worth 1$ costs like 300$.
i don't know how trustworthy rateships.com is, but according to them shipping costs to nigeria and trinidad are similar. and as for the last mile, the cost probably goes up because local shipping is rather unsafe (higher rate of theft of packages).
> from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a country in Asia...
I am in Asia, this means nothing, it's the largest continent on earth. I don't pay as much for shipping as the author does, but his struggles are nevertheless relatable: most sellers refuse to ship here, most of those who do want dozens and dozens of dollars for it, and some (few, usually Chinese) sellers save the situation from being completely hopeless.
In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.
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I don't think they are necessarily asserting otherwise
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So is Ireland.
> It does not take $60 to ship small sub $1 chips from Asia to Nigeria/Bangladesh
So don't even try to find how expensive is bring these to Brazil. Even the $5 orders from JLCPCB become infeasible for hobbyists here due to all the roadblocks.
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...
HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE.
Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.
The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.
Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.
>HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH.
I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and especially centric to the mindshare of the Bay Area's IRL conversations, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.
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Non-American here... what is DACH?
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" HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with DACH and CEE. "
I like to encounter discussions about German digital health system or the German start up system or neo2. I've never seen them so I doubt it.
Also almost no debates about Polish stuff (Hello neigbours!)
How is it not tech bro centric when every third thread is about some new feature of a random Anthropic product?
the fact that this comment is getting downvoted into oblivion instead of discussed is poignant enough.
fwiw, my experience is similar. hn has not been about startups, vc funding, or anything in that space for quite a while.
to paraphrase a classic, this place is like a memory of the forum we used to love, and the memory is fading.
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[dead]
So, you are calling the author a liar?
I disagree with some points in "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better".
For example, author claims that saving and restoring all registers in interrupt handler takes too long. But this can be solved alternatively, for example: split register set for use in interrupt and normal code. Or simply add two register banks and allow switching between them (assuming interrupts are not re-enterable). But author claims that ARM is better because it has a "store multiple registers" instruction. It wouldn't help because storing multiple registers still requires multiple bus cycles, and microcontroller probably has a 32-bit bus and no cache, so saving N registers requires N memory cycles - no matter, is it done with a single instruction (ARM), or with multiple (RISC-V). And implementing this ARM instruction makes the core more complicated with little benefit.
As for 3 instructions for array access, in a simple loop a compiler can convert index access to pointer increment.
The real weak points of RISC-V are:
- no trap on integer overflow and invalid FP results . Overflows cause vulnerabilities
- no optimizations for fast context switch, which is required for dumping legacy unsafe monolithic kernels, especially in age of AI actively searching for vulns
- weird vector extensions
> He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists. This is almost satirical.
His criticisms are entirely valid, because why can't the the thing that has a free spec and will likely dominate that space ... also be good too? Can't we have all the nice things?
To me it feels like the difference in positions is "this could be made better" vs. "but this is already so much better than before". Both are right.
Maybe I'm missing something important so far...
I was thinking the same. RISC-V is certainly impressive and I'm glad we have it, but the original article isn't wrong in its complaints either.
It definitely could have gone with a less abrasive tone (as entertaining as it is), so it's no wonder it's getting some pushback.
Maybe. I'm not sure if the original author's intent was to say how risc-v could be better or to say it is bad and people should use other (proprietary) ISAs instead.
It's more of the former.
Before this, the author has never recommended others stay away from RISC-V, just stated their own distaste for it and a personal preference to use any other ISA if given a choice.
Yeah the complaints in the original article are valid, but it's like complaints about Android or iOS. There are plenty of valid complaints against either, but neither is strictly better than the other.
I don't think the Author disagree with what the original article wrote. If anything everything he said seems to reassert what the original article intended to state.
And while things has died down a lot in the past few years, there is a reason why I wrote the line.
"You do not criticise The Rusted Holy Grail and the Riscy Silver Bullet."
Nice read!
Though it feels a bit strange that "I have exceeded the allowed number of requests. (500 times)" when I first clicked the article and I'm pretty sure I don't share the ip of my self-hosted VPN with anyone.
I think it’s telling the site owner, not us.
I got that too and couldn't read the site.
>He derives the case for the chip and then spends the rest of the article annoyed that the chip exists.
>This is almost satirical.
That's all that needs to be said.
It's like comparing Unity and Godot. Unity is better in every single way but one, you have to license it from a very poorly ran company.
You don't "own" your games, they ship with black box spyware. The pricing for using it can change from day to day.
I swear the Unity C level employs a Magic 8 Ball and consults it for key management decisions.
If you need to edit the Unity Engine source code your looking at a secret additional licensing fee which is certainly unaffordable for hobbyist and most indies.
Vs Godot which is completely free under the MIT license.
Everything about the above can be said for ARM as well.
RISC-V is free for everyone to play with. If you think it sucks you can always fork it and jerryrig it to work on existing hardware.
If you have money you can even get custom hardware for your forked RISC-V.
I very much enjoyed reading this article, I'm optimistic in seeing what OPs students come up with. This is life changing technology that's essentially available to all.
I'm not a professional game maker. But having used unity in anger in the past I found Godot a breath of fresh air. What unity really wins with is the unity asset store.
Which may actually be a good analogy. One thing I've seen rarely discussed is existing expertise/experiance, existing varification/tooling and existing quality reference implementations. Arm wins in all of the above over RISC-V currently, if you have the money to license from/work with Arm.
I lost the thread of his argument when he brought up the shipping expense:
> I pay anywhere from US $60 to US $200 to ship one dollar chips that people everywhere else get free shipping on
then follows with:
> the difference between a ten cent part and a one dollar part is not a rounding error and it is not a detail you get to wave past on the way to the interesting discussion about encodings.
When shipping is so expensive, doesn't the difference between $1 and $.10 unit cost become less relevant?
Working archived copy - https://archive.is/9FaRC
Is archive.is still a malicious site that DDOS's finnish security bloggers or has that been sorted?
Nope, that is still them.
Absolutely hugged to death.
Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260816073823/https://rvembedde...
503 for me. So good they crashed the IA
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https://archive.ph/9FaRC
> Request Limit: 500 per minute
I mean that is not even 10 page view per second. We are not living in 2006. Actually even in 2006 Apache with static page would have been able to handle that on a small VPS. And that is excluding CDN.
Original HN discussion referenced:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298035
Rate Limit Exceeded Too Many Requests
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A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Learns About Caching Generated HTML The Hard Way.
https://archive.md/9FaRC
I haven't seen this before, but this ReCAPTCHA required "mobile verification" from me, and asked me to download an app. Oh what a world we live in...
Find traffic lights for me. If it required an app, I would close the page.
It's been unevenly rolled out, but is mostly Google using attestation to tighten their grip.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143997
My perspective using Nix is that it's hardly worth standardizing ISAs. Recompiling software is easy and we should have a Cambrian explosion of different designs.
This is especially good if one scopes out a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA.
I disagree, compiler optimization and software ecosystem in general already take a really really really long time to build, and I think it'll take longer without a standardized low-level binary interface i.e. ISA to enable rapid distribution.
And the approach you mentioned here:
> a family of ISAs that are ABI compatible such that one can compile down to a semi-pre-optimized portable IR, and just do the last bit per ISA
I think this is basically WebAssembly and PTX, and one may argue, Java bytecode. Yet look at how much efforts and time it took for WASM runtimes and JVMs to actually produce performant machine code (the "last bit per ISA" you mentioned) for just a couple of architectures! (e.g. X86 and ARM). And I wouldn't surprised if NVIDIA pour even more money on building optimization pipeline from PTX to each of their different uArchs.
What exactly does a bespoke ISA buy you? What will justify hundreds of engineers writing a new good one & working through the compiler support?
I bet it would be pretty easy for a user to interoperate between 67 different drafts of the HTTP spec once they were all written, validated, and library implementations coded. But what would that Cambrian explosion of API revs actually get you?
An explosion of ISAs means the available talent for writing optimizing compilers will be stretched much more thinly. Unpopular ISAs will have slow, buggy codegen, and the popular ones will suffer somewhat, too.
Who uses the term '3rd world' 'third world' anymore?
I think I figured it out: there's wrought iron over the window...
This is the sort of content I endure this place for. Thanks for posting.
"Now price the same journey on the other side, forget x86-64 and that duopoly, patent minefield, with multi-thousand dollar debug probes; we'll take a look at ARM."
The 386 and 486 patent should have expired more than 20 years ago. No one tried to open source it. https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS/blob/master/0... There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.
" That is a better reason than elegance. and I want to tell Mr Grinberg, that the word priviledge he tosses around in his article also extends beyond the ISA depending on where you are in the world."
Grinberg is an emigre from Ukraine, which isn't the most privileged place in the world. In fact his research articles go deeper than the average software developer in Silicon Valley.
There are 386 and 486 open source reimplementations in Verilog (see z386 and z486). As far as I know, existing commercial 386/486 chips still manufactured (yes they exist!) are descendants of Cyrix work, not Intel or AMD. Consequently, VIA may be contractually holding those back rather than Intel/AMD doing anything there.
Thanks for that information! I have been interested in getting x86 produced in smaller nanometer (e.g. <32nm). My project: https://ei2030.github.io/FemtoTX/#about
Edit: It also appears Nvidia might also have an x86 license: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/
Also, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-licens... (Caveat: The startup is acquainted with the Intel CEO, so it's rare for them to grant the x86 license to non-buddies.)
"Intel provided Rosaic access to an unknown Atom-class core, which enables the company to build its own custom processors based on x86 general-purpose cores, according to the report. The renowned chipmaker plans to ship Rosaic register-transfer level (RTL) code for the Atom processor core, which will let the startup build its custom system-on-chip (SoC) both at Intel Foundry and elsewhere."
What's interesting is that a startup with limited funds would most likely seek a 32-bit x86 license if a) they don't need more than 4GB of RAM, and b), if they don't want to pay AMD for the 64 bit license add-on. :)
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There’s Vortex86 and VIA. VIA’s rights came from Cyrix, and this is where Zhaoxin‘s rights come from.
Thanks for supplying the chain of licensure!
> There were many companies that had clones in the early 90s, and I wonder whether any of them still have the rights to manufacture them.
To do that they, at least, should still exist. For most of them this is not the case.
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That is just an amazing website and initiative.
https://rvembedded.com/products/project-lab/
Definitely interested!
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with no vpn
I have no idea what's going on here, but the title alone gave me second-hand engineering stress. Solid post.
High shipping costs are the reason why many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America usually have freight forwarders They locally market themselves as package lockers, po boxes or online shopping companies. It turns out the expensive shipping cost doesn't scale linearly with package size or weight. The expensive shipping cost is a base price, and only rises slowly with package weight and size.
So, these freight forwarders rent a warehouse in the US, an LLC in the US for paying rent, and give away the address of the warehouse to their customers locally. Customers use the address when shopping online and their packages are dropped off at the warehouse. Then they employ people in the US to collect customer packages in the US into large bags, which are then shipped to the destination country via DHL.
DHL does charge the exorbitant shipping to third world country fees of 35 to 60 to 200 dollars that people here complain about. These fees are the base price for shipping, no matter how small or light the package is.
Then, to recover the fees, packages are handed over to customers at a minimum of 2.50 dollars per pound, per package.
For the business to work, income from these packages has to exceed the shipping cost. In Panama, you can probably fit 100 average packages into a 25 pound bag. That bag costs like 75 dollars to ship from the US to Panama. Then you make 250 dollars when people collect the packages. Local customers trade speed for cost, trading the 35 dollar base shipping price for 2.50 dollars and an extra week of lead time to wait for collection to complete in the US. They also don't have to go to the airport to pick up their packages since the business is ideally close to their house.
Businesses like Temu ship directly from china via companies such as PRS logistics and J&T express so their shipping costs to third world countries are lower and can thus bypass freight forwarders entirely so freight forwarders only remain for items sold within the US, where shipping to third world countries has a base price of at least 35 dollars, and whenever shipping to your country costs that much as a base price, even if it ships from China, or when a business only offers shipping to or within the US.
Sometimes, temu is more expensive than a Freight forwarder, but the user is freed from having to handle any logistics like using a particular address and choosing and registering with a package locker and travelling to pick up packages there and the shipping price remains under 10 dollars. However you still have to use a Freight forwarder for items over 120 dollars such as laptops and some car parts because temu doesn't carry those. Freight forwarding is also done in the exact way described above in China instead of the US because websites like taobao rarely offer overseas shipping. Again employing people in china and renting warehouses near airports there. Freight forwarders also offer marine freight instead of the default air freight.
Of course, renting a warehouse and employing people in the US is expensive by local standards. Worker pay alone is around 1600 dollars vs 600 locally. So, there are only a few freight forwarders which often offer b2b, and then package lockers use their sevices. To the end customer there is no distinction between a package locker and freight forwarder. Some freight forwarders also offer B2C package locker services, others are B2B only.
For example nelcon cargo, Uno express, airbox, mail boxes etc are vertically integrated because they are both B2B and B2C, cft cargo is B2B only. most package lockers do not do freight forwarding themselves and use a B2B service for freight forwarding, the package locker only offers proximity and thus convenience to neighborhood customers. Air freight via Miami international airport is the default, and most freight forwarder warehouses are located near this airport. In China, the bottleneck is not price, but speaking Chinese, so it is often run by locals of Chinese descent and is more niche than shipping from the US. This also means that taobao has a lower shipping volume and thus a smaller local market.
Buyee and Zen market, so called proxy services, are very similar to freight forwarders but the service is allowing foreigners overseas to purchase in Japan because most japanese companies do not offer overseas shipping. And there are a few freight forwarders in china as well.
"Rate Limit Exceeded"
Does anyone have an archive?
This blog post is very defensive and argumentative, which I guess is fair considering Dmitry's post is similarly inflammatory, but most of it was really not convincing:
> Simply put, the things a high-end CPU needs are diametrically opposed to the things a small cost-saving microcontroller core needs.
> The conclusion he draws is that no single ISA can serve both ends, and that RISC-V fans are fooling themselves, in theory the premise is true. The conclusion does not follow, and I can show you why from three parts sitting on my desk as we speak.
> CH32V003. This is the cheap "RV32EC" with sixteen registers, no multiplier, no divider, machine mode only,
> CH32H417. A dual core MCU that is unmatched in performance to price point and is at the higher end of the MCU line
> Baochip. A VexRISC-V with an MMU built around a stack thats open from silicon to os Baochip-1x: A Mostly-Open, 22nm SoC for High Assurance Applications
Uh, which one of these is a datacenter server cpu? Or a workstation cpu? Or at least a developer laptop cpu? How about a Raspberry Pi 4 level SBC (supporting latest ubuntu and fedora releases, driving a display that runs a browser and plays video ...)
There's a lot of angry indignation but it seems obvious that Dmitry is quite right about this.
But I found this is where this blog post starts making a lot of sense:
> Has anyone tried adding an MMU to a Cortex-M? The physical tradeoffs are real, the difference is that with RISC-V, the ISA owner does not decide for you where that boundary must be drawn. If you want virtual memory on ARM you license a Cortex-A instead, which is a different core family, a different profile, a different negotiation, and a different royalty.
> Compare what happened with Baochip. The RISC-V privileged specification defines supervisor mode and Sv32 paging as optional things an implementation may provide. VexRISC-V is an open core, somebody added an MMU to it. bunnie built a chip around it and runs a microkernel with real process isolation on it
Yeah, that is a good point. We're still in the low-end specialty realm, but that is real interesting advantage for RISC-V, a good reason for it to exist.
As for shipping to Trinidad and Tobago ... this post is trying too hard to turn this into moral issue, but it seems a bit random (OrangePi cost $30 and shipped free? you can also get arm-based and stuff from the same places), and the vast majority of people don't live on semi-remote islands, it doesn't make sense to consider this kind of accessibility above all else, and it's strange to blame Dmitry for not thinking of you here.
the author just focused on his personal experiences regarding RISC-V and what he's been able to see himself as an embedded developer. there's already RISC-V SBCs that are on par with the Raspberry Pi 5 and in terms of IPC the best RISC-V cores are only lagging 5 years or less behind the best x86 and ARM cores.
More than half the article is AI slop. Sad.
A fun fact about ChatGPT and its ilk is the final RL polishing of the responses was outsourced to Nigeria and other places with cheap labor, so the patterns you’re picking up in the article aren’t that the author sounds like ChatGPT, it’s that ChatGPT sounds like the author.
Same reason the southern accent has overlaps with west African dialects.
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The author of the article just got a fan.
Some serious stuff he builds on top of those chips.
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Beautiful.
I read the "They Should Have Known Better" article and forgot it. I've seen this before. I know it's hot air and does not matter, and I can't afford to worry about things that don't matter.
When I say I've seen this before, I'm talking about ancient history: controversies so old and so laughable that they've been forgotten. When, for example, AMD handed the world AMD64/X86_64, the same things were said: fragmentation, legacy+flawed ISA, etc. That has not aged well, and "They Should Have Known Better" won't either.
The "fragmentation" argument has no merit. The jumble of extension names and profiles in RISC-V are, in fact, direct evidence that RISC-V is succeeding: it's the RISC-V ecosystem aggressively, collaboratively and successfully tackling pain points and solving them. This is what RISC-V is supposed to be doing, and it's doing it, and empires are being built on it.
Take this part: "The existence of CLIC and various proprietary 'fast IRQ' / auto-stacking extensions is an additional indictment."
CLIC is miraculous. It's an advanced embedded interrupt controller, and it's wonderful: it brings the equivalent of ARM's NVIC to RISC-V, except better. You can implement an extremely efficient scheduler that guarantees deadlock-free concurrency: bare-metal, real-time, hardware-accelerated "Fearless Concurrency," on an MCU with no RTOS![1] Its appeal is so great that, despite still being a draft spec, the leading RISC-V MCU designers are adopting it. Espressif's ESP32-S31 has it, for example. The chaotic emergence of this awesome thing is what is condemned as an "indictment."
Speaking of ESP32-S31, it's going to be a monster when silicon becomes available in quantity. This RV Embedded writing mentions MMUs a lot. Guess what? The S31 has an Sv32 MMU. It can run Linux. Not μClinux. Real Linux. It's already been done twice (that I know of) on the Espressif eval boards. People like Armstrong Subero are going to change the world with it.
That's the froth of RISC-V. The ground is shaking, and the peanut gallery of ISA wizards has no power over it. In a few years, after RISC-V has lain waste to our world of proprietary ISAs and Western IP regime rent seeking, "They Should Have Known Better" will look as silly to everyone as it already looks to me.
[1] https://rtic.rs/2/book/en/
Just an unlucky spawn point. We need to focus on ourselves. "oh no shipping to some remote island is expensive compared to NYC that has next day free on everything" Well, duh.
So “you were born somewhere ‘unlucky’, that’s how it goes, sucks to be you”.
Is that really your take?
It's a distasteful take to be sure. But, what is GP supposed to do?
Frankly I'd rather be told that than the other common but tired SV-resident take of "just hustle, bro, stop sleeping, hustle hustle hustle. Learn to code, take loans from friends and family. Doesn't matter that you're born in a shithole, I was born in a median family myself, we only had one car and we rented our house!!! Just gotta work for it, everybody can achieve it. Those who don't, are clearly not working hard enough."
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Naïve take. We live in a global neoliberal economy, our standards of living are the direct result of introducing scarcity and other forms of exploitation elsewhere while keeping domestic populations largely unaware of how unfair their position is. There is no ethical basis to simply "focus on ourselves" here. We must do the exact opposite.
Appeals to an ethical basis don't work on everyone
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yo this is actually some really fire reading. i had to read it twice then go back and read the original that he's responding to here. i feel full of wonder right now seeing people who are this deep into compsci debating merits in the marketplace of ideas, there's just so much going on globally with computing that i never even get to see. super fascinating to read about the different constraints at play here even the global socioeconomic ones and how they apply to the chip world in general. it sounds like risc-v's real play is democratizing access to the entire embedded stack