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RISC-V Is Now An Official Debian Architecture
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Why is RISC-V significant? I'm completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Open standard CPU instruction set. Meaning people can design new chips for it without needing to enter an expensive license agreement.
I would have thought the license agreement would be one of the least expensive parts of making modern high-performance chips.
Quite the opposite. Well, sort of.
It's easy to get a licence, you just need money. Lots of money.
That's if you can get a licence. Intel only licensed to AMD because the USA military requires two vendors.
ARM charges an, err, arm and a leg.
Intel licensed to Cyrix (now VIA) as well, and it wasn't the military but IBM that wanted more suppliers
Oh yeah, I even had a VIA! What happen to them?
That was all from unreliable memory. TY for the error correction.
Tbh the biggest saving from this that I've actually heard was time saving some 6 months or even potentially saving legal costs during development. Which for a budget starting closer to nothing,like academics, open source, or early start ups, any cost is barrier.
It's actually very lucrative scheme. For example, you'll need to get some licenses to some Qualcomm patents before you can even buy their Snapdragon chips.
If you have the order volume, enough capital to book fab capacity and a solid margin, kind of. These agreements are often done in cents per chip with minimum volume amounts, this is why you see most complicated ARM SoCs targeted at the smartphone market first and trickle down into lower margin products later.
This is the consequences of only being able to get your licence from one vendor.
Because it's an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, ...) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
And Apple will get to do a fourth architecture migration
*fifth
I'm not really counting the 6502, since I don't think Apple ever bothered with emulation or backwards compatibility for it once they moved to 68000.
I thought their old PowerPc architecture was risc
Indeed it was. Different RISC ISA though.
This is for my own clarification, and anyone else that is confused by the terminology here.
In the mid- or late 1990s, I took a processor design class, and RISC was "Reduced Instruction Set Computer", a generic term for the direction processors were going at the time - even though they had a reduced set of instructions, and therefore had to process more instructions, they could run faster overall because the simplification meant they processed each individual instruction that much more quickly. (IIRC the class textbook was written by the people who had designed the MIPS processor.)
It was my understanding that the speed limitations in the traditional "complex" (CISC) processors were then overcome, so that processor design philosophy continues as well (in particular, x86 architecture is still CISC).
Now, I'm looking this up on Wikipedia: Okay, RISC-V is a set of instructions for a processor, and there are multiple open-source processors that implement RISC-V.
This announcement is that Debian now will theoretically run on those processors. Cool!
Its completely open source
https://riscv.org/blog/2023/03/top-ten-fallacies-about-risc-v/
Oh :/
It's still a good thing. It's an open specification, so anyone creating a design that is compliant can use software targeted at RISC-V. Just like you can buy USB-C flash drive from any manufacturer and use it with any OS that supports USB mass storage!
It's an open standard that enables open source implementation (and several industry supported options exist), most notably IMO xiangshan and vroom
Because we’re getting risc one way or another and the two targets are risc-v and arm. All the phones, tablets, mini pcs and apple made the jump to either arm or risc-v.