* Posts by AlanRWeiss

2 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2021

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

AlanRWeiss

Re: Installed base

Power, this, Power that .... PowerPC was awesome until IBM didn't want to stay in their swim lane, started building PowerPC chips for the merchant market, and out-fabbed Motorola. Until the 970, which was hotter than hell and no, 200 instructions in flight at any one time didn't cut the mustard cause it ran too damn hot.

AlanRWeiss

Re: Installed base

VLIW was awesome as fuck (to rip off Green Day) -- but COMPILERS? That was the hard part, and still is.

So too will compilers be a problem for RISC-V, because adding to the instruction set means adding compiler, and library, support for your new zippy-skippy instruction(s).

RISC is all about the compiler everyone. Once you have that, you can start compiling operating systems, RTOSs, and when you get Linux ported and singing a happy tune, you can try to port the browsers - and after all, JavaScript, JS frameworks (think React, Angular, and Vue, not to mention node.js), and the ubiquitous python allow for execution of enterprise applications (and, in the case of python, embedded code, too).

I worked on Windows NT for PowerPC, for Motorola back in the late Pleistocene. Some of my friends worked on DEC Alpha. I have experience with over 60 architectures (many of them DSP's, most of them dead as doornails). RISC-V is attractive because it's royalty-free, and as the late Harvard Business professor Dr. Clayton Christensen taught us, free and shitty eventually beats costly-but-awesome.

A shout out to Imperas Software, who is doing God's Work in providing software tools, simulators, and other fun and useful bits for the RISC-V world. I have no connection to them other than admiration.

Now, if Motorola had ever listened to Robin Saxby back in the day .... or built MCore better and had a better licensing scheme .... <sigh>.

Shout out to Lou Perazzoli and Dave Cutler, too, for Windows NT being sort of VAX VMS-like.

I'm getting freakin' old ....