Dr. Ian Cutress Explains The Hype Around RISC-V



RISC-V seems to get a lot of hype, so Gordon asked Dr. Ian Cutress from @TechTechPotato what the big deal is.

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This Post Has 48 Comments

  1. igrewold

    It's a good idea to se something in action…
    ExplainingComputers channel done a demo on RISC-V ; episode title :

    VisionFive 2: RISC-V Quad Core Low Cost SBC

  2. Anders Hass

    RISC-V got the vocal minority like Linux has, very often for the same reason (they tend towards open/freedom).

    Google is working on making Android to work on RISC-V so I would think that would be the earliest for it to be a thing for regular people. Otherwise perhaps small board computers like Raspberry pie will also be more RISC-V but not everyone is interested in such computer (as mentioned in the video, SiFive already got such a board with Linux being an option).

  3. 5:05 I wonder if pinecil and ESP32-C3 (along with some other ESP32s) are a good counter arguments

  4. Zorba Kaput

    A 20 second scan of the comments and it confirms Gordon was spot on!

  5. tEch-49

    read my lips…. risc v is πŸ‘Ž

  6. Paul

    SBC as "Small Business Computer", that's a new one. His doctorate is in Chemical Engineering.

  7. Noido Dev

    ARM has the problem with proprietary driver blobs. Also, I want chips which can be sanded down to look for hardware backdoors.

  8. Gary Wolfe

    Ian is embarrassingly wrong on the timeline here. Like, return your credentials wrong.

    Even w/out the impending inevitable application of AI with as reckless abandon as possible, there is enough non-AI tooling, expertise, just in the "prior art" that is ARM to make 10+ year prediction asinine.

    AI can already code. Once the models arrive for VHDL, lithography, layout, etc, and it'd be a delusion to think no effort is involved on this in earnest already, the iteration cycle will be massively shortened. It's gonna be a brisk ride…

  9. Lepi Doptera

    I am designing with microcontrollers regularly and I really don't give a fucking shit about what's inside or what instruction set that chip has. The compiler takes care of all of that for me. I care about IO features and maybe libraries and OS support, but that's about it.

  10. Era Scarecrow

    Risc-v fragmentation… I would say there should be no fragmentation. Keep in mind, it would have to have a software 'unimplemented instruction' to then emulate the instruction. Using that you could make a full set that works on everything, but only what isn't implemented is run via software, which may be as a separate rom chip.

    Compiling for a specific instruction set or testing which instructions are supported and using said instructions best would be preferred.

  11. coffeemaddan

    Balanced and informative. Good questions. Thanks for not talking-over the expert. πŸ™‚

  12. Jaike

    This is the thing though, right. My LSI SATA HBA has a PowerPC core in it, because PowerPC cores are super cheap and they are a form of RISC. RISC-V may easily be what replaces small embedded cores like that for the foreseeable future, and it's going to be really interesting because RISC-V is so much more customisable.

  13. J W

    Ive got a riscv64 virtual machine running Ubuntu mantic Minotaur on an amd fx9370 host

    Pretty much everything works well enough (haven't tested virtio-gpu yet), except pci passthrough from shot to guest… Tho to be fair, it doesn't seem to work with an aarch64 guest either

    Does anyone have any info on cross-architecture pci- passthrough?

  14. Shane NT

    RISC is a terrible misnomer. If anybody can tack on their own instructions, it won't be a "reduced" instruction set for long

  15. System76 is a surprisingly bad example for a potential user of RISC-V. Everything they do is premium x86. I think he meant companies like PINE64.

  16. Barr Detwix

    For the RISC-V fragmentation bit, there are standards now!
    They call them Profiles. That's what software will be expected to target in the future, if successful, and that's the minimum base that most hardware will want to support.

  17. Retro Sean

    "Freedom always sounds great until it turns into chaos…" πŸ€“

  18. Disobeyedtoast

    i think if risc-v was licensed under GPT it would help a lot with the fragmentation issue

  19. shep husted

    riscV is more open and innovative but if they can make a real run – even people like ibm have failed spectacularly so everything remains to be seen, arm looks pretty strong – all these companies need to build a portfolio and good sw/hw stacks – they aren't there yet but mkt sentiment is growing for these alternative platforms – wait and see

  20. GoblinPhreak

    to be fair, we have proton on linux translating windows games to work on linux/steamdeckOS, so could something happen to desktop computing where we move to RISK and have a translation layer that flawlessly runs windows x86-64 applications? because if that happens we might see a switch away from x86-64 pretty fast.

    riscV, riscV, riscV

  21. iNDi

    Ian thinks he's the only Dr ..

  22. Todd Buiten

    Many years ago Intel sealed the fate of x86 by ignoring the low power processor market. They were so deep into CISC that they felt that more instructions was the way to continue capturing value. So folks like me and Apple switched to ARM. That was all well and good except for ARM's licensing games, so I've moved to RISC-V where I don't have to worry about this anymore. I currently have microcontrollers running RISC-V and it's been a seamless transition. I expect the same as we get to larger processors.

    But why I really think RISC-V will win is as follows:
    1. Linux has proven that open source works
    2. The rate of innovation is higher with more players
    3. Because of its block architecture, fabrication costs are lower because you only need transistors for the modules you include
    4. No ISA licensing fees or worries about future shenanigans by the license holder as we see with ARM today
    5. Greater security as fewer instructions reduce the attack surface. Generating code with compilers makes security patches easier
    6. As mentioned in the video, the Chinese have an intense interest in getting away from licensing restrictions as levers to make them bend to international will

    This time has been long coming for a part of the industry that still remains mostly proprietary. I first encountered RISC in the early 1980s and was immediately sold on the architecture. It's taken a long time to get RISC into the mainstream with ARM. But no one wants ARM to become the next Intel by protecting what it has from innovation. As always happens in the computer industry, once an ecosystem becomes large (Windows, x86, IBM, and now ARM) and is controlled by a few players then those entities switch from innovation to defense of their technology to retain their dominance. Open source fixes this problem. And I wouldn't worry about fragmentation. Linux has shown that good ideas stick around and bad ideas get kicked to the curb. It's market forces in action.

  23. Dazdigo

    Well in 5 year, I expect humans to walk around with weaponized prosthetics. That's what Deus Ex: Human Revolution's world says.

  24. Mads

    RISC-V have had a few changes over the years.Mainly in the way they want to sell their licensing. The problem is that they are becoming closer to arm in that regard and I'm not really keen on it.

  25. Jay Dee

    Too many contradictions from Cuttress, 'never' and 'for now' in the same sentence. Gently.

  26. Jay Dee

    The llvm compiler has made fragmentation a small issue.

  27. There are a few risc-v sbc/dev boards starting to show up in Asian markets that advertise Linux support. Not sure how standardised they are though, haven't got any of them.

  28. T. C.

    RISC-V is the Linux of CPU architecture/instruction sets. It's important.

  29. John Doh

    For use in devices or machinery, RISC V is going to have an advantage and so will ARM. X86 isn't really meant for that world, not even little cores that AMD or Intel will be good for that world. That's a good thing.

    For making a device that's used for doing anything like a PC, there is X86-64 and then a distant 2nd is an ARM processor that's been highly customized and modified, and it belongs to Apple. And if there wasn't the Apple name behind it that's had decades of products that were successful it's unsure if the M1 would have been successful enough for there to be an M2. I would say probably not even with as good as it as at doing various tasks. Apple took years developing the M1, as in many years with an expensive engineering team and it took the money sitting behind Apple to make this. This is why I laugh when I hear people talk about how ARM will take over home computing. No it won't.

    And then you have X86-64 and you have Intel saying they want to get rid of the old support and just put out an X64 (X86S) CPU and that's probably a good thing. The issue is of course compatibility with existing 64 bit ISA for X86-64 because users of this platform don't want two different ISAs. This was the issue in the past when Intel developed a 64 bit ISA for PC after AMD did, and the world said NO to it, and they had to adapt AMD's 64 bit ISA. It's probably best if Intel and AMD would cooperate on this and put out something that's probably best called X64 not X86S and that way they could figure out the best ISA they can because these companies need each other like it or not. And I say this because both companies have different extensions, and they should take what's currently there and standardize it into one ISA so that at this point a single compiler will pump out the best code possible for what exists now. That doesn't mean it would be an ISA frozen in time as each company could still add extensions as they see fit. They would only need to be concerned with running 64 and 32 bit code, and I assume 32 bit code would be emulated. There's a LOT of 32 bit code that different entities still need to run. However it's time for 16 bit to completely die for this platform because it creates too much inefficiency for X86-64.

  30. Esra Erimez

    I am eager to have a Horse Creek development workstation

  31. Esra Erimez

    In my humble, the importance of RISC-V cannot be overstated.

  32. Teardown Dan

    How fast RISC-V will gain market share in the consumer-facing space is mainly a matter of how greedy ARM will dare to get. ARM ownership changing hands every few years with the looming possibility that it may get bought out by one of your competitors and price you out of the market over the next 5-10 years would be another reason for anyone who depends heavily on ARM for their business to get RISC-V migration plans ready just in case and arrange existing work accordingly.

  33. youcantata

    RISC-V is too little and too late. Maybe 15-20 years late. I cannot figure out any good use case of appliaction that RISC-V is better than ARM decisively. Cost, performance, power consumption, ease of development or maintenance, knowledge base, experience, IP library, availability, variety, support, stability, portability or compatibility, multi-sourcing or anything. Cost of ARM licensing is negligible for most application. RISC-V will go path of old MIPS architecture and fade into obscurity in next 10 or 20 years.

  34. DD

    Ian, where is my potato chip?!

  35. a a

    Horse Creek looks like a really good chip for Network Attached Storage devices to replace the Jasper Lake cores used today.

  36. Andi Archer

    The only key word missing from this was Celeron πŸ˜†

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