[ale] Really cool new hardware

[jonhall80 at comcast.net]

> In all seriousness, most of the RISC-V interest (and volume ?>production) is on the microcontroller side of the market, >targeting various real-time OSes.

I disagree.  I think the interest is across the board, for several reasons.

While the ARM processor invigorated the market with a low-power, flexible RISC architecture that could be fabricated by multiple companies, there were some problems.

The licensing and start-up costs were fairly high.  This prevented smaller companies and institutions getting into the marketplace of producing compatible ARM chips with extended capabilities.

Things are different than when Intel and AMD got started.   You can have easy access to FAB plants, good design tools, FOSS software and crowd-funding.  But when you are working on a shoestring, paying out a half-million to million dollars in licensing fees to get started is daunting.   A million bucks is five good engineers for a year.

ARM started to move into the higher capability chips, but that was limited by their own engineering teams.

RISC-V is allowing (encouraging? Cheering on?) an open design model that allows many companies to invest in parallel.

About two years ago I participated in a campaign to port the last 1400 (!) files from Debian packages to make them 64-bit for ARM processors.

Twenty-five years after I gave Linus his Alpha processor there were still 1400 architecturally non-portable files and programs due to address space considerations in Debian.   By having an architecture that is designed from the ground up to be portable, this type of problem might be fixed.

Secondly I am seeing interesting mixtures of FPGAs, DSPs and other architectures mixed with the RISC-V chips.  NVIDIA is interested in using RISC-V at the bottom of their GPUs.

The low-power capabilities of RISC-V is also attractive.   When you have 500,000 processors in a HPC system, every half-watt you save goes a long way, in both direct power and cooling.

In a SBC that I am working on in Brazil, we switched from using 5 volts to power the SOC to 3 volts, and went from 10W power to 5W of power used.  This actually allowed us to turn up the clock, since the heat generated was lower.   So lowering the voltage and power allowed the chip to run faster.

Warmest (no pun intended) regards,

maddog


> On 01/19/2021 8:13 AM Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2021 at 07:48:42AM -0500, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> > I think the "made for Linux" is a reference to the board and not the chip.
> 
> Well, yeah.  It's not like it can be "Made for Windows"  :)
> 
> In all seriousness, most of the RISC-V interest (and volume production) is
> on the microcontroller side of the market, targeting various real-time OSes.
> 
> So it's not really "Made for Linux" so much as "Made for Real Operating 
> Systems(tm)" -- covering hardare features like support for more than a 
> couple of megabytes of RAM and a real MMU.
> 
> Anyway.
> 
>  - Solomon
> -- 
> Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
>                                       @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
> High Springs, FL                      speachy (freenode)