10 ms·

the main problem with RISC-V is also the main selling point: there is no single owner company behind steering development and making sweeping decisions how wil

by muyuu 1mo ago

the main problem with RISC-V is also the main selling point: there is no single owner company behind steering development and making sweeping decisions how will that pan out over the long term is really unclear and the reality is performance is actually catching up quickly

LeFantome 1mo ago
History tells us that open standards pretty much always beat out proprietary ones in the end. You cannot buy the company backing RISC-V to take out the competition. And if a RISC-V company stumbles, the ecosystem carries on. But if even one RISC-V company is in the right place at the right time, RISC-V can surge ahead. It is hard to imagine it does not dominate eventually.
- genxy 1mo ago
  Which is really the subtext to Grinberg's rant. It has technical flaws that he dislikes, but those won't stop RISC-V from dominating in the market. You get these kinds of responses when something is too close to perfection. It suddenly gets judged in a much different light.
- windward 1mo ago
  I don't agree with history telling us that at all. HDMI, MP3, MPEG, .docx, DirectX, CUDA, I'm sure there are more. History tells us that money wins. But I also think this is an example of a slight disingenuity in RISC-V being referred to as open-source. It's borrowing the clout of open-source software projects where the end user has the freedom to compile them at home. I can't fabricate a CPU at home, I'm still beholden to whatever patents the manufacturer chooses to license. SiFive have a >billion dollar valuation, for a business based on selling licences.
  - vachina 1mo ago
    Those standards are adopted because they work. And they work because someone poured in tons of RnD to make them work. And those people are incentivised to do the RnD because they get paid (patents). Nowadays nobody will want to work on foundational open source work for free only to enrich everyone else that builds on top of it.
daemin 1mo ago
What I see is that you'll get low end chips for embedded applications, because you tend to specifically build and compile programs for things as small as that. You'll also get the large sever and massive super-computer scale systems, because yet again you'll compile code specifically for those systems. What you're less likely to get is the consumer level PC and Laptop systems, as you'll need one large company to set the standard and others to adhere to it. So you could feasibly compile a program for a certain level of RISCV chip and have it run on many vendors processors. As it is there's several companies trying to push ARM for some sort of high end consumer PCs/Laptops but they all require different OSes and the chips aren't equivalent, so you have to compile software separately for those different platforms.

by muyuu 1mo ago

LeFantome 1mo ago

History tells us that open standards pretty much always beat out proprietary ones in the end. You cannot buy the company backing RISC-V to take out the competition. And if a RISC-V company stumbles, the ecosystem carries on. But if even one RISC-V company is in the right place at the right time, RISC-V can surge ahead. It is hard to imagine it does not dominate eventually.

genxy 1mo ago
Which is really the subtext to Grinberg's rant. It has technical flaws that he dislikes, but those won't stop RISC-V from dominating in the market. You get these kinds of responses when something is too close to perfection. It suddenly gets judged in a much different light.
windward 1mo ago
I don't agree with history telling us that at all. HDMI, MP3, MPEG, .docx, DirectX, CUDA, I'm sure there are more. History tells us that money wins. But I also think this is an example of a slight disingenuity in RISC-V being referred to as open-source. It's borrowing the clout of open-source software projects where the end user has the freedom to compile them at home. I can't fabricate a CPU at home, I'm still beholden to whatever patents the manufacturer chooses to license. SiFive have a >billion dollar valuation, for a business based on selling licences.
- vachina 1mo ago
  Those standards are adopted because they work. And they work because someone poured in tons of RnD to make them work. And those people are incentivised to do the RnD because they get paid (patents). Nowadays nobody will want to work on foundational open source work for free only to enrich everyone else that builds on top of it.

daemin 1mo ago

What I see is that you'll get low end chips for embedded applications, because you tend to specifically build and compile programs for things as small as that. You'll also get the large sever and massive super-computer scale systems, because yet again you'll compile code specifically for those systems. What you're less likely to get is the consumer level PC and Laptop systems, as you'll need one large company to set the standard and others to adhere to it. So you could feasibly compile a program for a certain level of RISCV chip and have it run on many vendors processors. As it is there's several companies trying to push ARM for some sort of high end consumer PCs/Laptops but they all require different OSes and the chips aren't equivalent, so you have to compile software separately for those different platforms.