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Comment by dfed-mpls | Hacker News Reader

"RISC architecture is gonna change everything."

Out in the real world, I know of cases where proprietary CPU or DSP IP was rejected in favor of RISC-V alternatives.

RISC-V may not change everything, but I do believe that it will change on thing in a major way: the financials of CPU IP such as Tensilica, Cortex-M0, ARC etc.

There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.

Edit: in the maker world, the so-called Blue Pill is incredibly popular. It has an STM32F103 SOC with a 72MHz Cortex M3 and tons of digital and analog interfaces. On AliExpress, these boards go for $1.60 a piece!

https://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill

> There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.

Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.

$0.25 is very, very high.

I don't know who was supposed to pay the $0.25, but gizmos like external hard drives is a commodity market with razor thin gross margins.

Whoever decided that $0.25 was reasonable for that kind of market (Apple?) essentially killed the protocol right there.

Edit: here's the story: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of...

Steve Jobs changed royalty model from a flat licensing fee to a $1 fee per port (insane!), Intel walked away and cancelled all FireWire development, Jobs lowered it then to $0.25 but Intel didn't come back.

I remember PC and laptops equipped with a single fireware port well into the late 2000s even though peripherals are pretty much extinct by that time. Even Apple themselves appeared to have given up by removing them from newer ipods.

It's also about friction. You can download the RISC-V design straight off github (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and start using it immediately. You don't have to phone up ARM or bring in lawyers to negotiate a license.

At least ARM smartened up on that one with the Cortex M0 and M3 DesignStart license, which requires no up front fee and you can just download the code for evaluation.

Probably still a good idea to have a lawyer read things over...

....it was a snarky movie quote from 1995. One that pops up in every thread about RISC-V

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/

Without context, quotes from obscure movies from 1995 are a bit of a gamble!

Generally true, though that quote since then has been used so many times, I suspect that even google has lost count.

For those in the dark still, it stems from this scene: https://youtu.be/wPrUmViN_5c

Something new to add to my repertoire!

FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!

"Yeah, RISC is good."

Fifth time's the charm.

hence the quotes.

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