RISC-V and Linux Foundations Partner to Promote Open Source CPU (techrepublic.com) 92
"The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announced yesterday a joint collaboration project to promote open source development and commercial adoption of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)," reports TechRepublic:
Though some devices that integrate RISC-V will use real-time operating systems rather than Linux, the use of Linux in development will be instrumental as existing tools are being extended to support the RISC-V ISA when developing software on traditional computers. "This joint collaboration with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to offer more robust support and educational tools for the active RISC-V community, and enable operating systems, hardware implementations and development tools to scale faster," said Rick O'Connor, executive director of the RISC-V Foundation, in a press release.
In many ways, RISC-V is a hardware equivalent to the open source principles that guide the Linux project, as the ISA is open source, is not subject to patent encumbrances, and is available under the BSD license. [L]icensing fees for Arm or MIPS ISAs -- both of which are fundamentally RISC in principle -- can be avoided by using RISC-V.... As alternatives like Alpha, SuperH, MIPS, and even Intel's own Itanium processors have fallen by the wayside, organizations using those ISAs in their products have had difficult adjustment periods transitioning away, while patent encumbrances largely prevent third parties from continuing development or providing drop-in replacements for those technologies. RISC-V's open nature prevents these issues, as it is possible for any organization to extend or customize their own implementation, and any organization can produce their own RISC-V processors.
Manufacturers like how RISC-V CPUs aren't restricted to a single manufacturer, according to the article, which points out that NVIDIA and Western Digital have both announced plans to use RISC-V in some upcoming products.
RISC-V is also "gaining popularity in Internet of Things, low-power, and embedded applications," and Western Digital even plans to ultimately transition its annual consumption of processors -- one billion cores per yer -- to RISC-V.
In many ways, RISC-V is a hardware equivalent to the open source principles that guide the Linux project, as the ISA is open source, is not subject to patent encumbrances, and is available under the BSD license. [L]icensing fees for Arm or MIPS ISAs -- both of which are fundamentally RISC in principle -- can be avoided by using RISC-V.... As alternatives like Alpha, SuperH, MIPS, and even Intel's own Itanium processors have fallen by the wayside, organizations using those ISAs in their products have had difficult adjustment periods transitioning away, while patent encumbrances largely prevent third parties from continuing development or providing drop-in replacements for those technologies. RISC-V's open nature prevents these issues, as it is possible for any organization to extend or customize their own implementation, and any organization can produce their own RISC-V processors.
Manufacturers like how RISC-V CPUs aren't restricted to a single manufacturer, according to the article, which points out that NVIDIA and Western Digital have both announced plans to use RISC-V in some upcoming products.
RISC-V is also "gaining popularity in Internet of Things, low-power, and embedded applications," and Western Digital even plans to ultimately transition its annual consumption of processors -- one billion cores per yer -- to RISC-V.
So, do tell (Score:1)
Who's fabbing these things and where can I buy them? How about an ATX board I can plug these things into?
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TSMC will fab them for you.
Western Digital plans to use RISC-V processors [designnews.com] in their storage products starting next year. Most likely they will be fabbed by TSMC.
It is not clear if these RISC-V chips will be available to other companies or to the general public.
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Why wouldn't it be available?
Because Western Digital is in the storage business, not the chip business.
It is available to anyone.
No it isn't. Open Source doesn't work that way. For instance, if I install Linux on my computer, that doesn't mean I have to give you my computer.
Western Digital is under no obligation to distribute their chips to anyone, nor do they have any obligation to share the innovations done to turn a Verilog design into working silicon.
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These chips are available to anyone who wants a fab to make them
It is not that simple. You can't just take a pile of Verilog source, even code that runs fine on an FPGA, and slap it onto real silicon. There is a huge amount of work fitting the design to the process. Of course, you could just make a metalized gate array, but that will give you little advantage over just sticking with a core on an FPGA.
there's no secret sauce there.
Actually, going from a raw design to a working state of the art chip involves plenty of "secret sauce".
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Ditto. If anyone wants to see part of the difference, contrast ASIC designs with FPGA designs. You have to do a lot more work for ASIC and you need chip design experience. There is also a lot that goes into any SoC that isn't part of the ISA. RISC-V is just the ISA, that's it.
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If you have the Verilog and a working FPGA, a standard cell ASIC is pretty straightforward, assuming that good design practice was used for the source. For a given level of performance and a given process node, standard cell will have better timing margins.
AMI used to offer FPGA to standard cell conversion as a service.
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It is not that simple. You can't just take a pile of Verilog source, even code that runs fine on an FPGA, and slap it onto real silicon. There is a huge amount of work fitting the design to the process. Of course, you could just make a metalized gate array, but that will give you little advantage over just sticking with a core on an FPGA.
Just place-and-route alone can be a pain in the rear, let alone functional verification, design for test, synthesis, etc.
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Only the CPU core itself is open source. You'll need a memory controller, cache controller, PCI-e bridge, and a lot of other stuff to make a working CPU. The RISC-V people will be happy to sell you this stuff under a proprietary license.
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That would be insane - an SSD disk drive with a built in GPU / compute engine. That would get close to the "take the CPU to the data" approach for big data processing.
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That would be insane - an SSD disk drive with a built in GPU / compute engine.
RISC-V does not have an integrated GPU, nor does it even have SIMD vector instructions. Things may change in the future, but for now it is in no way a "compute engine".
It is ideal for low power embedded systems ... like drive controllers.
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an SSD drive mostly only needs a fancy multiplexer. The computational part could be done on a SOT-26 package micro otherwise.
That's why the economics lean so heavily on them doing it themselves; what they need is about the cheapest possible embedded processor with that pin count. Not having to license a design means they push the costs down to the theoretical minimum.
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AMD already sells a GPU with an integrated SSD: https://www.amd.com/en/product... [amd.com]
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Yes, it is very clear.
No, they will not be available to other companies, or to the general public.
This article, about the Linux Foundation partnering with RISC-V to encourage creation of chips available to the general public. Western Digital was mentioned because they're an example of what is being done already.
If those things were the same, they would not have even mentioned them both.
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You can buy RISC-V boards but they are very expensive.
The thing is it's just a CPU core. You still need peripherals, e.g. memory/PCIe/SATA/USB/network controllers and a GPU. So for producing an open computing platform it's not really got much of an advantage over ARM. You are replacing one small part of the system with one that is licence free but also less optimized and mature than ARM, which is already extremely cheap and well supported.
It's great if you need an embedded CPU core for your FPGA project or
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Yeah, it's mostly of interest to companies that can make use if the core directly, rather than for hackers or consumers looking for a fully open processor.
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Re: So, do tell (Score:1)
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I don't think there are any consumer grade ones that are being manufactured yet. I've only seen fpga based dev boards. It's expensive to get such a low volume chip manufactured.
The cheapest dev board available is $60 (currently OOS): https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15026
Here's a faster $119 one: https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/
Despite the hype surrounding RISC-V, it's basically just a free/open processor that's comparable to a MIPS design, without the IP licensing costs. It's likely going
FPGA? (Re:Now we need an open source FAB.) (Score:2)
Might not need a fab but it would help to have FPGAs that are cheap enough and fast enough to make usable computers for people to use.
There's some pretty powerful development boards out there that can be turned into a usable general purpose PC if given the right programming, software, and maybe some help with off the shelf on GPUs or such. Just being able to drive a few USB ports for display (DisplayLink USB to HDMI chip comes to mind), storage, keyboard, mouse, etc. can go a long way. Compile a Linux kern
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Does anyone know of anybody working towards that goal?
Here's an even better question, is it actually a realistic goal? If a modern fab fails, people around it will die. What happens if your desktop fab fails?
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If a modern fab fails, people around it will die.
What? What possible fab failure could cause people to die? Sure, a stepper could be a nanometer out of alignment, or a half-step UV photolithography lens could be slightly out of focus, but neither of these is lethal.
What happens if your desktop fab fails?
Get a new wafer and another bottle of etchant? Fabbing can be done at home, and there are hobbyists that do it. If a 100 micrometer step size is good enough, and you have time and money to burn, then why not?
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What? What possible fab failure could cause people to die?
Silane leak [electroiq.com]. We've never had one because we use double-walled pipes and leak detectors. Peripherally-related rant: We could do the same thing for oil pipelines, and utterly prevent spills, but we don't because that would cut into oil executive yacht purchases.
It's not safe to have normal people owning and operating chip fabs, because humans are insufficiently responsible. Just look at 3d printers, how many people are using a negative-pressure cabinet with carbon filters on the exhaust to capture their wors
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Oh, and accept that death is not a bad thing per se.
Death due to some lame's desktop chip fab is a bad thing by any reasonable measurement. It won't just kill the schmuck who fails at operating it, but also his neighbors. I don't care if people autoeuthanize, but I do care if my neighbor's fuckup kills me
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Do you realice how complex and expensive a modern semiconductor fab is? You are never going to see one in your local maker space.
Nvidia had RISC-V on their GPUs for years. (Score:1)
The controllers on their graphics cards are RISC-V. Now they're considering implementing their compute cores as well since the compilers are good enough.
Assuming this trajectory keeps up for the next couple of years, nothing short of a Mill Computing level breakthrough will stop RISC-V from replacing ARM and x86. There's just little to no value in paying for ISA IP when the fabs are doing all the real hard work anyhow.
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So with RISC-V, I need to create all the other stuff that goes into an ARM SoC. I presume that grows on trees? For one thing, you'd have to get the parties pushing RISC-V to settle on I/O standards between all those other widgets on an SoC, as well as the widgets themselves. So keep dreaming of pink unicorns, they're out there somewhere.
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So with RISC-V, I need to create all the other stuff that goes into an ARM SoC. I presume that grows on trees? For one thing, you'd have to get the parties pushing RISC-V to settle on I/O standards between all those other widgets on an SoC,
They already have done so. There are typical interconnects used between cores and other logic blocks, because this is already how chips are designed by the people who design them. They create blocks which they can glue together to form complete designs.
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The controllers on their graphics cards are RISC-V. Now they're considering implementing their compute cores as well since the compilers are good enough.
Assuming this trajectory keeps up for the next couple of years, nothing short of a Mill Computing level breakthrough will stop RISC-V from replacing ARM and x86. There's just little to no value in paying for ISA IP when the fabs are doing all the real hard work anyhow.
I’m just curious how long we will remain in the dark ages because of Imaginary Property. Many are skeptical of the Mill, but suppose it pans out; how would that innovation benefit people in this lifetime? We’d now have a wonderful new proprietary architecture that no one will touch, because there isn’t a second source. So it will remain confined to niches until the patents run out and someone implements the ideas anew, which may only repeat the cycle with a minor variation. Without an open
IoT? (Score:2)
>"gaining popularity in Internet of Things, low-power, and embedded applications,"
Because it's a slow CPU architecture.
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Relatively slow but also low transistor count and therefore decently low power. Also free to embed in your ASIC as Western Digital is doing.
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in fact there are a lot of potential negatives for the end-user, including:
* insecurity by obscurity
* fragmentation and incompatibility - i.e. vendor lock-in
* customised back doors
these problems would be mitigated if the license required sharing via a GPL-like license (GPL v3, to prevent the patent loophole)
Re: The fundamental principle isn't cost-avoidance (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, many of those patents for performance enhancing features using out-of-order execution were based on a single research paper. That was implemented in one CPU vendor design, then cross-patented to other CPU vendors. RISC-V has the advantage that it doesn't have those vulnerabilities baked in and built upon.
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The most congent observation one can make is that the BSD license killed BSD.
Linux owes it's success to the GPL. Technologies being equal, if the licenses had been reversed, it would be BSD crowing about its success. Instead BSD cries in its beer.
I want this in my laptop. (Score:2)
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"BSD", as some idiot quoted it, is NOT a "License", it's a *Copyright*. There is a huge difference there. Get it right.
The BSD style Copyright is now best represented by, and deployed as, the following...
https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src... [openbsd.org] https://www.freebsd.org/copyri... [freebsd.org]
With additional discussion here... http://landley.net/toybox/lice... [landley.net] https://urchin.earth.li/~twic/... [earth.li]
You should also know that the next major release of FreeBSD 12.0 will be out in 1.5 weeks :-)
You can liveboot the RC3 sampler from USB today.
Copyright is a legal concept emblazoned in the United States Constitution and in many other countries around the world. To make a lot of legal stuff as simple as possible, it means "if you write the code, you own it and have the right to say what happens to it". Since you are the owner, you now have to do something to allow usage by someone else. That "something" is the license. BSD is a license, not a copyright. BSD always was more permissive than most other licenses, and over the years it removed th
open source ISA, not CPU. (Score:2)
It should be noted that RISC-V is an Instruction Set Architecture and not a specific CPU. There are both open and closed implementations of it but they all match a specification. It's like UNIX, there is no single implementation of UNIX but there is a specification of what a UNIX provides.
I want one of these (Score:1)
Need single board equiv, like Raspberry PI (Score:1)
- at least dual core CPU, potentially with a quad core option
- reasonable amount of memory, 1GB or more, (or DIMM slots)
- multiple USB ports
- storage, (SATA, SDXC or fast USB port for external storage)
- network, (WiFi, Ethernet, or a fast USB port for network dongles)
- video, (or PCIe slot for video card)
- Some expansion, (like PCIe, or more than 1 USB port that is a fun
standards (Score:2)
don't know much about the risc-v ecosystem, but lets hope it doesn't turn into the same clusterfuck as ARM.