China to push RISC-V to global prominence – but maybe into a corner, too, says analyst Attempts to restrict technology transfer to China could see the RISC-V architecture become more prominent, but also reduce the diversity of development around the platform. So says analyst firm Counterpoint Research, which on Monday noted that Arm today owns more than a third of the market for semiconductor IP and is well …
Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/
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Does anyone remember this? Is Intel still doing this? How about AMD or ARM? ....or maybe RISC-V?
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Billions of transistors....megabytes of embedded memory.....an on chip OS......isn't there more to worry about than the Chinese and RISC-V?
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Just saying!
Does anyone remember this? Is Intel still doing this? How about AMD or ARM? ....or maybe RISC-V?
Intel: https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel
AMD: https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd
ARM: It really is up to the people who roll the chips what they want to add or not add. e.g. In any RPi SoC the GPU controls the boot process! ( https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6685 the second post in the thread by Dom confirms the boot process ).
What RISC-V does will also be up to the people who roll the chips, and they will do whatever they have are used to doing up until now. Unless of course a standard is put in place ( https://xkcd.com/927/ )
It is like Slartibartfast in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, when assigned to the continent of Africa in Earth Mk II, he began "doing it with fjords again".
"better power consumption performance promise"
What does this actually mean? "Our performance is worse than ARM but it'll get better"? Because, you know, ARM has been doing this sort of thing a long time and has a lot of experience. ARM isn't likely to stand still and wait for a competitor to catch up, so what's this "promise" exactly?
That comment is based on a single prototype CPU by MicroMagic, which is single core, single threaded, and manages more performance per watt on a single benchmark. So there is a long way to go before RISC V can even consider that to be a the vaguest of promises.
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How about a better question: Does power consumption performance matter if the user doesn't care.
Western users have been told to be concerned about power consumption performance. But what happens when you only care about performance, power consumption be damned?? If the Chinese government only cares about catching up with, and then increasing, homeland MIPS, and are willing to 'donate' the MWh to pay for it, what does it matter to them about power consumption? They can handle that issue after they hit the distributed MIPS target, if they care at all.
China is building ghost cities, after all. From the appearance of looking-in from the outside, it may be fully possible that they don't care much about environmental impact of MIPS-per-Watt, they only care about getting the job done.
You're a bit outdated, their "ghost cities" are being populated quickly as they reap the benefits of selling them at high prices and making citizens happy with the dictatorship. Probably how they're getting away with raising the child limit, economically.
You're missing the point. In the microcontroller sector power consumption performance is not about environmental impact, it's about "How long will the battery in this remote sensor last?", "How heavy will the battery be in this portable device?" and other similar performance/weight/longevity tradeoffs.
Truly communist processor would equally distribute resources to tasks and would not favour performance aka profit.
The security aspect is also questionable - in theory the tasks should have equal access to memory, otherwise you could imply that one task is more equal than the other.
Karl Marx's favourite saying: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The population have the ability to work hard. The Party needs to party.
The government of China knows how to pick the most useful bits out of communism just as well as many countries where the popular way to deal with commies is to "round them up, put them in a field and bomb the bastards."
Both the article and all the comments so far don't mention what RISC-V is, why it appeared and what else is needed to make it into a system. RiSC-V is a natural evolution of several similar proprietary families that are built around a set of registers, a three address reduced instruction set, a five stage instruction pipeline and separate data and instruction caches. Although the registers are all nominally general purpose (and are all identical for addressing purposes) a number are dedicated for both machine control and stack management. The ARM actually conforms to this model but its got a bit of secret sauce in its instruction set in that it includes a built in 'skip' that allows instructions to be optionally ignored depending on the results of the previous instruction. So what's the big deal? Standardization is common throughout industry. RISC processors are efficient -- we've known this for 50 years -- so they can be made to appear as any particular external architecture (CISCs are invariably microprogrammed, there's a RISC or two in there that is running dedicated code because its impossible to efficiently design the logic any other way).
So what's all the fuss about? The Chinese are just doing the smart thing and converging on a standard, one that at least they have a measure of control over. There's not a lot else to say except that it does illustrate the way that politicians and pundits seem to completely misunderstand how the world works. De-factor standards like x86 and ARM emerge not because they're necessarily the best but because in the absence of incentive there's no need for an alternative. The needless shaking of the tree by our government merely provided the incentive and compounded the problem by failing to realize that its also an opportunity to design out the mistakes and shortcomings of the existing architectures. All we're left with is the "Chinese are just copycats, they can't invent anything" which, as anyone who's worked with Chinese people knows, is just racist blather. Its our growth industry.
China has publicly stated they are getting behind the home grown Loongson architecture as their future direction. They've got a bunch of the big tech companies cooperating on that.
It might take a few years to get off the ground, and maybe that will end up being more for internal use but they aren't going to be putting all that many resources into RISC-V when they can use older ARM cores for a time until they are ready to go all-in on Loongson.
It's amusing that Loongson's architecture is MIPS64-RISC-V fan fiction. FWIW it's thought Loongson will eventually get on board with RISC-V but it's not a given.
Counterpoint seems to have based its view on that "over 70% of RISC-V premier members" are in China.
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