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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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RISC-V is like LEGO, where you can put together pieces to make whatever you want. Nobody can tell you what you can or can't make, you can be as creative as you want. Oh, and there's motors and stuff too.
ARM is like Hotwheels, there are lots of cars, but you can't make your own. You can get a bit creative making tracks, but that's about it.
AMD and Intel are like RC cars, they're really fun, but they use a lot of batteries and you can't really customize them. Oh, and they're expensive, so you only get one.
Each is cool, but with LEGO, you can do everything the others do, and more. Like LEGO, RISC-V can be slow to work with, especially if you don't have the pieces you want, but the more people that use it, the better it'll get and the more pieces you can get. And if you have a 3D printer, you can make your own pieces and share them with others.
Right now it's more like megablocks
"you" as in person with required skills, resources and access to a chip fabrication facility. For many others they can just buy something designed and produced by others, or play around a bit on FPGAs.
We will also see how much variation with RISC-V will actually happen, because if every processor is a unique piece of engineering, it is really hard to write software, that works on every one.
Even with ARM there are arguable too many designs out there, which currently take a lot of effort to integrate.
Sure, and there are more people with that access than just AMD, ARM, NVIDIA, and Intel.
If game devs supported RISC-V, Valve could've made the Steam Deck without having to get AMD's help, which means they would've had more options to keep prices down while meeting their performance goals. Likewise for server vendors, phone manufacturers, etc, who currently need to buy from ARM (and fab themselves) or AMD/Intel.
And that's why I mentioned 3D printing. Making custom 3D models of LEGO pieces is out of reach for many (most?) and even owning a 3D printer is out of reach for many. I have one, but I've only built a handful of things because it's time consuming.
As it gets more software support, we should see a lot more variety in RISC-V chips. We're not there yet, but we should be excited because it's starting to get traction, and the future looks bright.
It also means that anyone can make their own instruction set extensions or just some custom modifications, which would make software much more difficult to port. You would have to patch your compiler for every individual chip, if you even figure out what those instructions are, and what they do. Backwards, forwards or sideway (to other cpus from other vendors) compatibility takes effort, and not everyone will try to have that, and instead add their own individual secret sauce to their instruction set.
IMO, I am excited about RISC-V, but if the license doesn't force adopters to open their designs under an open source license as well, I do expect even more portability issues as we already have with ARM socs.
Compilers basically already do that, and distributed executables usually assume minimal instruction support. Compilers can detect what's supported, so it's largely a solved problem, at least if you compile things yourself.
I really wish that an affordable desktop chip fab was a thing. Maybe with graphene semiconductors it could be feasible.
It's affordable today, but only for big orders in the millions (e.g. someone like Valve is big enough).
It would be super cool if small batches (hundreds) were feasible, but I don't think there's much demand there since that's where FPGAs come in.
This is a great answer.
That's not entirely true. There are companies that have the ARM achitecture license, like Apple or Cavium (now bought by Marvell). They are allowed to make their own hotwheels using the spring system or the wheels or whatever.