this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Why is RISC-V significant? I'm completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Open standard CPU instruction set. Meaning people can design new chips for it without needing to enter an expensive license agreement.
I would have thought the license agreement would be one of the least expensive parts of making modern high-performance chips.
Quite the opposite. Well, sort of.
It's easy to get a licence, you just need money. Lots of money.
That's if you can get a licence. Intel only licensed to AMD because the USA military requires two vendors.
ARM charges an, err, arm and a leg.
Intel licensed to Cyrix (now VIA) as well, and it wasn't the military but IBM that wanted more suppliers
Oh yeah, I even had a VIA! What happen to them?
That was all from unreliable memory. TY for the error correction.
Tbh the biggest saving from this that I've actually heard was time saving some 6 months or even potentially saving legal costs during development. Which for a budget starting closer to nothing,like academics, open source, or early start ups, any cost is barrier.
It's actually very lucrative scheme. For example, you'll need to get some licenses to some Qualcomm patents before you can even buy their Snapdragon chips.
If you have the order volume, enough capital to book fab capacity and a solid margin, kind of. These agreements are often done in cents per chip with minimum volume amounts, this is why you see most complicated ARM SoCs targeted at the smartphone market first and trickle down into lower margin products later.
This is the consequences of only being able to get your licence from one vendor.
Because it's an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, ...) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
It's an open standard that enables open source implementation (and several industry supported options exist), most notably IMO xiangshan and vroom
Its completely open source
https://riscv.org/blog/2023/03/top-ten-fallacies-about-risc-v/
Oh :/
It's still a good thing. It's an open specification, so anyone creating a design that is compliant can use software targeted at RISC-V. Just like you can buy USB-C flash drive from any manufacturer and use it with any OS that supports USB mass storage!
Because we’re getting risc one way or another and the two targets are risc-v and arm. All the phones, tablets, mini pcs and apple made the jump to either arm or risc-v.