Posts by lkcl

China may prove Arm wrong about RISC-V's role in the datacenter

Re: A shot in the head is worth two in the feet

> RISC-V is opensource

no - it isn't: it's Trademarked. there exist open source *implementations* of that Trademark: none of those implementations grant You (the Trademark Licensee) the right to use the word "RISC-V" in connection with that commercial product.

> Or modify it.

as long as you remove the word "RISC-V" if you do not seek a Trademark License in your commercial product (or do not care about Trademark Law) ... yes.

> I expect China to have it's own fabs at similar nodes by that time.

they'll have low-cost tablets and smartphones and IPTVs as soon as the software (android) is ready, because 28nm is the "low-cost sweet-spot" and you don't need more than 1.5 ghz for a *low-power* low-cost (battery-operated, mobile) processor.

but there is something really important here that everyone is missing, best explained here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24459314

there's a glacially-slow trainwreck coming, unfortunately, as it takes time for companies to appreciate that RISC-V - the "simple" RISC ISA - has been drastically *over*-simplified. it will be perfect for embedded uses (eating ARM's Embedded market), but for high-performance - particularly where software interoperability begins to matter - it's going to be a cluster****.

RISC-V takes steps to minimize fragmentation

Re: Difference with OpenRISC & OpenPOWER

> Exactly how this make RISC-V as an ISA specification different

> from either OpenRISC or OpenPOWER?

in many ways.

Patents:

* OpenRISC has zero patent protection of any kind. it is a huge risk for any commercial company to use it.

* the Power ISA has literally thousands of patents behind it, spanning back 20+ years because the Power ISA dates back as far as 1993. when creating an ASIC and having shown that it passes the Compliance Suite for Power ISA 3.0 / 3.1, you get an automatic Royalty-Free Grant from IBM. https://openpowerfoundation.org/blog/final-draft-of-the-power-isa-eula-released/

* RISC-V has patent "we won't sue each other" agreements between its *Members*... but there is *no protection from other people*. as a result there are already multiple patent infringment lawsuits underway against manufacturers of RISC-V ASICs. whoops.

Specification Contributions:

* OpenRISC - totally open. covered by Copyright Law. do what you like as long as you respect Copyright.

* RISC-V - Trademarked, and not "open" at all. it's "ITU-style" (closed-doors development). you are forced to join the RISC-V Foundation and to sign a "Commercial Confidentiality" (secrecy, NDA) clause before you can contribute to the ISA.

* OpenPOWER - not strictly "open", but at least you can contribute via an "External RFC" Process to the ISA Working Group. this is currently going through Ratification at the moment and there should be an announcement shortly.

"Customisation":

* OpenRISC: totally do what you like as long as you respect Copyright Law. you're on your own because there are not many people doing anything with it

* RISC-V: customisation is "permitted" but there is absolutely no way in hell that any of your "customisation" will end up "upstream". it is sandboxed in some "custom opcodes" and if you happen to conflict with anyone else on those custom opcodes, tough s**t. basically the "customisation sandbox" is intended for proprietary systems where the customisation, including the compiler, toolchain and libraries, will NEVER see the public light of day.

* OpenPOWER: customisation is also permitted and a sandbox Major Opcode (EXT022) is provided for that purpose, along with an area of SPRs. submission of "popular" or "general-purpose" extensions are encouraged to be submitted to the ISA WG. Power ISA is pretty much exactly in the same boat here as RISC-V, with the exception that (a) there's less contention (Power ISA is less "popular") and (b) you aren't forced to join the OPF to make ISA RFCs.

Capability

* OpenRISC: is... well... not that good. correction; for what it was at the time, it was an astounding achievement given that it's entirely Libre/Open. however it's 32-bit, and implementations never really went beyond 130nm.

* RISC-V: this article says it all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24459314 but as if that wasn't bad enough, performance between RISC-V implementations can be as high as a 2x variation. they're supposed to be "compatible" (RV64GC) but if they're that different, how can you trust them, commercially? the Alibaba Group had to add a whopping extra 50% custom (rogue) instructions in order to meet par-performance with a high-end ARM Cortex A73. note: custom ROGUE instructions. that will never be accepted into the RISC-V ISA because they dominate the "sandbox".

* Power ISA: designed from the ground up as a Supercomputing ISA. adrian_b's comparative summary is the best analysis i've seen so far. although the Power ISA is by no means "perfect" it at least has Carry and Condition Codes, and LD-ST-with-update. it doesn't have "LD-ST-shifted" which both ARM and x86 have, but RISC-V has neither.

basically, several large organisations are deeply regretting their decision to go with the "easy" RISC-V "because bandwagon because Academic".

> If fragmentation is in fact bad and not a feature bullet point,

> then what is the point behind allowing anyone to modify it and still call it 'RISC-V'?

exactly.

Re: Let's hope they are able to enforce RISC-V branding

there is actually a "Certification" Process, and there is supposed to be a Trademark. however one of the things about Trademark Law is that reasonable in-good-faith requests for participation must be treated Fairly, Reasonably, and Non-Discriminstorily (FRAND). i made approximately ten in-good-faith requests to participate over an 18-month period, explaining each time that the conditions set by "Membership of the RISC-V Foundation" were not appropriate for my business model and incompatible with my funding remit. i did not receive one single response. that constitutes "discrimination", and is grounds for *invalidation* of the RISC-V Trademark.

by complete contrast, IBM set the specific condition that the Power ISA would only be handed over to the OpenPOWER Foundation if contributions to the Power ISA via its ISA Working Group included an *EXTERNAL* RFC Process that specifically did *not* require Membership of the OpenPOWER Foundation. as a non-member you cannot vote, you cannot engage in discussions, but you can at least make a proposed addition to the Power ISA. this process has taken years to negotiate and get established: due to the Power ISA being so well-established, IBM wanted to make absolutely certain that it was done right.

totally ironically, RISC-V was conceived, developed, and rolled out during the time it has taken to get the Power ISA paperwork and legal issues resolved!

Web devs rally to challenge Apple App Store browser rules

what contributing to webkit looks like

this bugreport is indicative of a pattern of systematic abusive behaviour

within the webkit team:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16401

i actually had this feature fully-functional within something like 6 weeks.

the remaining *YEAR* was spent attempting to deal with increasingly

abusive behaviour by Mark Rowe, who demonstrated some of the worst

kind of "bad faith" Technical Goal-Post-Moving i have ever been

subjected to when contributing to a "Free" Software Project.

not one single patch was ever accepted.

when answering the review requests, 100% of them were shut

down with "justifications" that were never discussed further. to

test this i created smaller and smaller patches, and these were

also shut down. when working with someone else who accepted

one of the patches, Mark Rowe hunted it down and reverted it.

these are not safe people to work with, and it was not a surprise

to me when google hard-forked WebKit and called it "Blink".

only a Corporation with the resources of google could have

pulled that off: everyone else in the world has to put up with

the systematic power-abuse

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/21/10/03/233256/andrew-yang-suggests-power-may-affects-politicians-brain-neurons