For the longest time, if you needed a CPU, your choices were basically IBM, Intel, DEC, or Motorola (ignoring small, embedded systems). Then some academic papers came out on the value of a ‘reduced’ instruction set. That led to Sun SPARC, IBM POWER, MIPS, PowerPC (and a few other) processors, most of which eventually disappeared.
Another group called ARM came along and offered not just an alternate reduced instruction set, but also the baseline code needed to implement all that. This way, you could cobble together your own CPU for exactly what features you needed (memory, disk, networking, GPU, etc). Having a baseline sped up development a lot, but you had to license that stack and pay ARM royalties.
That hummed along quietly until Apple and NVidia decided to create their own ARM-based chips. All of a sudden, ARM became known as a beefy, power-efficient option for phones, desktops, laptops, and servers.
In 2010, a bunch of academics dusted off the old RISC papers and came up with RISC-V. Companies were started to follow the same model as ARM: modules you could cobble together to make a custom processor. Except all of it was open-source and you didn’t have to pay the ARM license fee.
AI/ML processors are now the new thing. The big race is between Intel, ARM-based processors, and RISC backers to see who can come up with integrated, power-efficient AI processing features and quickly roll them out to customers. That world is divided between beefy processors used for training in data centers, and small, efficient ones used for running inference at the edge (ie phones, cars, gateways, etc).
I guess just making sure my understanding aligns - RISC V being the instruction set, and you are wondering if anyone is building a CPU to implement it?
Came across a couple examples, if that’s what you mean
I’d recommend the Explaining Computers videos on RV over LTT, especially since the guy at EC does a lot more research into RISC-V, and does yearly “state of RISC-V” videos.
This layer looks kinda dated and not maintained. Have you tried building meta-riscv? I have had success building a custom image for the visionfive 2 using the meta-riscv layer. (Same SOC as the pine64) I would start off with just the minimal core image. Not sure if you’re are looking for graphic support, I was only interested in a headless configuration.
<…> the representatives wrote in a November 2023 letter that called for creation of a “robust ecosystem for open source collaboration among the US and our allies while ensuring the PRC is unable to benefit from that work.”
That’s not how open source works you fucking moron.
If they change the terms of the RISC-V license to include sanctions blacklisting it would just encourage forking and guaranteeing failure of the restricted license in the long term.
I mean this is why RISC-V intl. moved to Switzerland, because no one wanted to adopt a US-controlled ISA that they’d arbitrarily cut access to if you didnt align to their geopolitics.
I don’t know if the US has any power to restrict RISC-V in China, but if it does then RISC-V dies almost immediately after in terms of its potential to supplant ARM and X86
That is valid … in peace-time when everybody accepts that.
The problem is that the reality is a lot complex. Open source only exists, because of the open source licenses. The open source licenses are only valid, because of the copyright legislation. That legislation is only valid, … because the nation-state has determined it is valid.
Consider a scenario where a nation-state (whatever state that may be, just making a general starement here) decides that for sectors it conciders critical for the state, it -or companies that act on its behalve- are allowrd to use / copy / enclose whatever open source technology they want without being subject to the requirements that come with the opensource license. So they can use whatever open source technology they want but they do not have to return anything to it. They can even use it in closed products.
That is an interesting scenario. And of course nobody can prevent abuse of open source projects if legal institutions are abolished or held at metaphorical gunpoint, but even in that case the actual open technology would be still open to others. It would just limit the contributors that contribute back to the project. If x country hard forks the existing project, ignores the license, stops contributing back and starts working on it solo, it would get isolated pretty fast. Nobody wants to do business in a country that offers no legal protections. We even have a recent example of that happening. Russia nationalized a few international businesses and as a result many companies just pull out of the country. Yandex (who was owned by Dutch mega-company), sold out to Russia for half of what they were worth since the risk to keep operating was too high.
Open source license abuse is nothing new, big companies do that all the time since small volunteer contributors doesn’t have the capital to force compliance.
Creating an open HW and open SW based on Risc-V and linux/bsd/android (whatever) is what the EU should have done for its citizens. But instead of creating something, they only know how to alienate companies. And I don’t mean american companies, but also european ones.
they extended one set of assembly instructions with a bit of another. instruction sets are determined by the hardware and are called the architecture. RISCV is an extensible architecture meaning you can add in additional instructions without breaking compatibility with programs targeting the architecture.
I know as much as that and that intel has like a giant black box and gatekeeps giving people instructions (and prevents people from being able to fix their fuck ups, backdoors etc)
the x86 instruction set is public. implementing it breaks copyright law, if you aren’t AMD or Intel. it has to be public or compilers/interpreters/assembly code couldn’t exist.
no, it’s not a hypervisor. it’s a a bit of hardware with access to the network stack that allows firmware updates and monitoring (in the “is the computer on/overheating” sense - it gives access to the low level sensors). it’s supposed to be disabled if you don’t pay money to turn it on (ie enterprise customers) but there’s no way to really know because the motherboard chipsets don’t expose access to it. it /shouldn’t/ be able to function because the motherboard needs to cooperate in order to make it function but we don’t really know what the chipsets/bios do/don’t implement. so it’s a theoretical attack vector by the USG.
the AMD version of the same is much more limited and doesn’t even exist on consumer chips, if you don’t buy workstation or server hardware. and if you do buy those, the motherboard exposes the control functions with documentation on which network interfaces it’s able to use. it’s also frequently open spec these days so you can run your own FOSS management firmware. very handy if you e.g. need to access the bios when the video card won’t turn on or your overclock is busto.
Intel is basically just stupid and too lazy to only include the extra silicon in chips where it’s actually possible to use it. and too greedy to open up the specs to make it possible to control it yourself on chips where it can be used. don’t give Intel money. AMD appears to be all in on open source specs and actively contributes to the open firmware/open source bios initiatives so it’s likely that it will become standard on their hardware over the next 5ish years (their code sucks ass so it’s very hard for projects to merge/debug quickly so it’s a slow effort lol).
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