There are a lot of advantages to using risc-v over x86. Using a risc instruction set is key to how M1 works. There’s a great explanation here, but basically what it comes down to is that having fixed size instructions allows easily and predictably chopping up incoming instructions into blocks and then checking if they have any inter-dependencies. Any instructions that don’t can be executed in parallel. This is something that’s not possible to do with a cisc architecture.
If Chinese companies abandon x86/arm architectures then they will also be able to abandon all the baggage associated with them the way Apple did with M1. Starting fresh opens up possibilities for efficient SoC architectures that don’t need a bus and have shared memory between different processing components.
With China seeing this as a national security concern there will be state level resources devoted towards designing these chips, and I expect to see interesting things come out of that in the near future.
The biggest question is whether Chinese companies will choose to keep their tech open source or simply base it off risc-v and close it up.
i never criticized risc ISAs or risc-v in particular, and never said they don’t have any advantages compared to cisc ISAs, the former by all means have huge potential
in my comment is simply criticized wildly false claims made by a company in an article that is very often liked when discussing risc-v
Yeah, that’s fair the claims about performance are sensational. The part of the article I linked that I thought was interesting was that there does appear to be a serious push to start using risc-v architecture in China.
I agree that designing and manufacturing chips is an enormous challenge, but it’s not an insurmountable problem either. If China starts devoting resources towards this at state level we’ll almost certainly see chips that can rival what Apple achieved with M1 in the near future. This is a matter of national security for China, and that translates into effectively unlimited resources being devoted to solving the problem of having a domestic chip design.
There are a lot of advantages to using risc-v over x86. Using a risc instruction set is key to how M1 works. There’s a great explanation here, but basically what it comes down to is that having fixed size instructions allows easily and predictably chopping up incoming instructions into blocks and then checking if they have any inter-dependencies. Any instructions that don’t can be executed in parallel. This is something that’s not possible to do with a cisc architecture.
If Chinese companies abandon x86/arm architectures then they will also be able to abandon all the baggage associated with them the way Apple did with M1. Starting fresh opens up possibilities for efficient SoC architectures that don’t need a bus and have shared memory between different processing components.
With China seeing this as a national security concern there will be state level resources devoted towards designing these chips, and I expect to see interesting things come out of that in the near future.
The biggest question is whether Chinese companies will choose to keep their tech open source or simply base it off risc-v and close it up.
i never criticized risc ISAs or risc-v in particular, and never said they don’t have any advantages compared to cisc ISAs, the former by all means have huge potential
in my comment is simply criticized wildly false claims made by a company in an article that is very often liked when discussing risc-v
Yeah, that’s fair the claims about performance are sensational. The part of the article I linked that I thought was interesting was that there does appear to be a serious push to start using risc-v architecture in China.
I agree that designing and manufacturing chips is an enormous challenge, but it’s not an insurmountable problem either. If China starts devoting resources towards this at state level we’ll almost certainly see chips that can rival what Apple achieved with M1 in the near future. This is a matter of national security for China, and that translates into effectively unlimited resources being devoted to solving the problem of having a domestic chip design.