So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or don't require fancy graphics -- servers, network hardware, microcontrollers, etc. But it would be a tough call to put one in a phone, tablet, or laptop.
So I can see RISC-V being ideal for applications that are not user facing or don't require fancy graphics -- servers, network hardware, microcontrollers, etc. But it would be a tough call to put one in a phone, tablet, or laptop.
This would be a impediment typically, but considering they're blackballed already, how beholden are they to patents? Block imports? Think that's being done already. Requiring US companies to not do business with them? That's being done already.
At this point, they just have to ride out the US/China trade war and then when things are being negotiated, I imagine a "turn a blind eye" to Huawei is going to be given. They're gimped in some ways, but in others they've probably never been more free.
As an aside to that, how do foundaries know whether their client designs infringe on patents? Is there some sort of automated system that goes through the design files they are sent looking for areas of silicon that may contain infringing IP blocks?
Realistically, no. The only two competitive, bleeding edge foundries are TSMC and Samsung.
I'm going to venture a solid guess that no such system exists in America simply because possessing the IP to match potentially infringing IP against would be problematic for the companies it's designed to protect.
Intel: "Hey GlobalFoundries, you're not one of our suppliers but here's the schematic for our latest chip. Please make sure nobody takes it!"
And I can all but GUARANTEE that doesn't exist in China. Unless of course it's to pick up any IP they might have missed when they stole it the first time.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/us-indicts-huawe...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-04/huawei-st...
As for Huawei, the fact that the bans and sanctions tend to be fluid and negotiable despite being called a national security issue kind of puts the "national" part into question. Someone certainly benefits.
And consider that the media does a great job in painting half of the picture. The other half is filled with the complete absence of articles related to US companies trying to steal secrets. The plausible explanation is that the media is heavily biased (in al honesty it's not like they could publish articles on active operations). In this context does it seem fair to judge having only half the information?
The decision to put Iran on a ban list, as I wrote very clearly.
> reports regarding Huawei attempting to steal trade secrets
This is called a "national security" issue but doesn't appear to be treated as such. Which means the threat is not taken seriously or there is no threat.
> I don't see the same reports coming out of US companies in regards to Chinese companies
I'm not sure I understand. The reports about Huawei came from US companies. But in case you were wondering why there are no reports about US companies attempting to steal trade secrets there are 2 possible answers: 1) US companies never spy or 2) US media never talks about it. Which sounds more plausible to you? And if it's 2) I'll ask again: is it fair to form an opinion having only half of the picture?
The ZDNET story is about a Huawei engineer ... wait for it ... asking someone at Foxconn about what components Apple uses in its smart watches.
The CNBC story is about Huawei and a tech company founded by one of their former employees suing one another, each alleging the other stole trade secrets. These sorts of disputes happen all the time.
You'll notice that nowadays, there's tons of reporting on every minor IP dispute or claim involving Huawei. At the same time, and I'm sure this is completely coincidental, the United States government is trying to paint Huawei as a "bad actor," so that it can be used as a hostage in the trade war.
If we're all just gonna take our marbles and go home, I guess there's nothing really stopping any of us from just making our own marbles.
Still pretty dumb to make your own marbles though. But I get your point there.
I think there is room for an open source straightforward GPU based on the standard principles. Although maybe there is patent licensing between all the parties that I am not aware of.
What? As far as I understood it, CPUs had plateaued outside of efficiencies, GPU power still follows Moore's. Generational benchmarks show big leaps in every new arch on userbenchmark, whereas CPUs from 7 or 8 years ago are only marginally slower (SC) than modern ones.
That is because GPU scales very well with Transistor count, throw in more transistor and memory bandwidth and you are good. On the CPU you could have doubled the transistor budget and get marginal improvement in IPC.
IPC improvements are still happening, which is why Intel has been on 14nm for years and still makes CPU's every year that are a little bit faster, but they are hard to do and you only get incremental improvements.
If someone could figure out a way to write regular software that easily parallelized to hundreds of cores, CPU's could also get the same leaps in performance that GPU's have been enjoying. It's a software problem more than it is a hardware problem.
Amdahl's law [1] , and while we have demonstrate parallelised code can speed things up, generally speaking Software performance still have lots of low hanging fruit without even going deep into parallel and concurrency world, it is just a matter of cost whether it is worthwhile to improve or fix it.
- GPUs don't handle I/O other than writing to video RAM.
- GPUs don't handle interrupts.
- GPUs don't handle branching well.
For the first two, a lot of infrastructure that is part of the chipset and platform would have to be extended to each compute unit of the GPU.
Imagine a database on a GPU. It's not like 1.5K-2k+ cores that are super good at math can read and write your disk or disk array at once.
See Amdahl's law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
You can use Binet's formula or matrix exponentiation to calculate it without such a dependency.
GPU’s are fine or even better for a wide range of compute tasks see CUDA etc, they just end up being very slow at a subset of common tasks.
Now GPUs are designed for running multiple computations simultaneously, like CPUs, there's the fact that most operations cannot be trivially parallized. Matrices and linear algebra can because of obvious reasons — large grid of numbers, easier to process at once than with a for-loop. Most problems are not like this. The next step for computing may be FPGAs, digital circuits that can be reconfigured on-the-fly. Certain new Intel CPUs have this and most processors have a basic version in the form of microcode. Whether this will work out, I do not know. FPGAs is too more compatible with trivially parallized tasks than your usual CPU based workload. Theoretically in future you can perhaps spend 20min compiling Minecraft or Factorio to FPGA bitcode during the installation process, though more likely it is only the processor intensive bits that gets optimized. When you load the game, part of the chip gets reconfigured for it. I believe this will benefit long running processes more than short ones.
Now I am no subject domain expert so somebody with more insider experience should elaborate on this.
More powerful GPUs will happen as Moore’s Law continues for a few more years, but the free for all will soon be over.
This is true for the whole semiconductor industry, and the consequences will be very interesting, not necessarily in a good way.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libre-RI...
RISC-V might make sense inside of the GPU accelerators though. GFX command list processing, DMA engines, and video codecs all make sense to be something like RISC-V.
That has nothing to do with the RISC-V ISA being the right choice for core functionality like shader cores.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/297099-chinese-vendor-...
That how you know it's nothing but a marketing campaign to boost their stock price.
This is not popular to say, but it is accurate and my statements are sourced. Feel free to provide rebutting evidence if you disagree.
[0]: https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/china-us-trump-t...
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-s...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent...
That's a very fun verdict