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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

I hear what you are saying, and that is a good point, and I do agree with the: "Why isn't there an open ISA?"

I think the key difference with an OS like Linux and an ISA like RISC-V is that Linux helped literally millions of smart, curious kids get exposed to Unix and tinkering in a OS that wasn't a locked down behemoth: Windows. It changed lives. I don't think it is an exaggeration to overstate the democrization Linux had.

However, I don't see RISC-V touching the world in an analogous way. No kid is gonna tinker with an ISA and fab a CPU. Maybe they will stick it on an FPGA? But it seems less accessible.

Plus RISC-V's biggest propopent, Patterson, isn't really giving the world anything like Linus Torvald did. Linus busted his butt (and still does!) whereas Patterson flies around getting big speaker fees to pump up RISC-V while delegating. Just seems a bit... off? Or its just me.

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You raise good points. Linus is a one in a million person... At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs. Look at projects like MiSTer, simply not something that was available for hobbiests and free culture advocates 20 years ago. I can see a similar development happening in the computer space. Actually I’m surprised homebrew computers architected around an FPGA haven’t yet become more popular. Maybe as the popularity of RISCV grows we’ll see more of that. Would be great to see a project that implements a risc-v based computer on a de10-nano board as a starting point.

I spent most of my career is a microarchitect at Intel in the late 80's till mid-90's on 486 & Pentium and then again in the late 2000's on Xeon. So the idea of tinkering with an ISA is something that gives me the cold-sweats today! It's a wee bit more complicated than hacking the RTL/VHDL, but I am not saying curious kids should not have the chance to have a go at it! RISC-V is more akin to if I handed a kid a Boeing 747 and said, hey, go nuts! :)

However, I taught programming in an afterschool program in the mid-80's and the Apple //e had an amazing graphical program that stepped through an assembly program, showing the data moving through the busses from register to memory, etc. And it was instrumental to kids learning. There's a few more wires in a 32-bit RISC compared to an 8-bit 6502, but someone will benefit!

Interesting perspective. It’s true the jump from 8-bit to 32-bit architectures involved a lot more than just increasing the data bus width, it came with advances in processor architecture so I understand where you are coming from. That said, I think the hobbiest community will find a happy medium in terms of complexity / hackability. Establishing a base platform seems to me the most important first step.

Somebody knows the name of this Apple //e program?

> "At the same time I do think kids, hobbiests, small startups, and people who can’t afford expensive computers will make use of RISCV on commoditized programmable logic chips like FPGAs."

No, they won't. By definition, FPGAs always give you less performance per dollar than custom silicon. If they can't afford an expensive computer, then FPGAs and the tooling to use them is even more out of reach by a long way.

By the working analogy here, Linux is also at a disadvantage because it doesn’t run the majority of commercially supported consumer software yet many people still use it. It has shown that people are willing to choose free options even if it’s technically less advanced than closed options. A fully featured de10-nano board costs ~$150 [1] so it’s readily accessible, at least in comparison to desktop pcs.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Terasic-Technologies-P0496-DE10-Nano-...

Steam's system survey shows Linux desktop usage at ~0.85% and general consumer surveys show less than 3% usage even after thirty years of development and that is in spite the fact that it costs nothing. Moreover, a $45 Raspberry Pi 4 costing a third as much will have vastly better performance as a desktop than any logic it's possible to fit on the DE10 board costing $150 that was mentioned. The examples provided therefore demonstrate the exact opposite of the points you are trying to make.

<=1% usage does not contradict any of the points I made. I never claimed >1% of people would make the freedom over convenience trade off, just that there exists people who would and it would be important to them.

I don’t see anywhere near 1% of people running a RISC-V softcore based computer on a de10-nano board but I would and many other hackers like me would.

I for one would love to.

Or to at least have a FPGA embedded in the machine Novena(*) laptop style.

(*) the open source laptop by Andrew Huang.

To be fair, interest around ISAs has never been so high. Now RISC-V workshops ("build your own core") are kind of everywhere, from Udemy to most universities, some of which are even targeted at teenagers.

The resulting RISC-V cores are mostly emulated, but are expanding knowledge of FPGAs immensely as a side effect.

There are so many hardware hackers and makers these days, such as Hackster.io [0], that they are transforming the world around us. We need more of them and RISC-V is well positioned in this space.

[0] http://hackster.io

I think you're underestimating the amount of curious kids who are more on the electrical engineering side of things. Who, sure, probably won't get to play with a CPU fab line, but then again that's somewhat like sending kernel contributions is to "tinkering with Linux".

It really is a just question of any level of hobbyist-accessibility (think photo-etching 2 PCBs of less sophistication vs. making a run of 100 perfect 3-layered PCBs in a factory) - and I've seen quite a lot of projects popping up around FPGAs lately that seem to indicate they're starting to approach the Arduino-ish level of approachability (though it's still obviously very far).

RISC-V just might be one of the things on the way to a whole "sillicon-tinkering" scene, so I'm pretty hopeful.

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