Intel to Create RISC-V Dev Platform with SiFive P550 Cores on 7nm in 2022
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
From what I read they are canceling that line and instead offering low power regular desktop processors.
That's why I bought 4x 8-core Atom servers at 25W, so I don't get GPUs in my low electricity servers / high performance alternative to Raspberry 4.
RISC-V is probably going to take a decade to reach the kind of stability the latest Atom line has in terms of support and performance, if ever; specially on the server-side.
The Xeon line CPUs consume way too much power to be an alternative for home hosting with lead-acid backup.
How much did you pay? Last time I checked these were still a couple of times more expensive than Raspberry Pis.
Same Gflops/W but about 4x Watt so for things that cannot be distributed (like a shared MMO world in my case) it's probably as good as it gets...
But you need to buy this GPU adapter: https://streacom.com/products/db4-gpu-cooling-kit/ (for the small CPU)
And buy M3 female-female spacers that are 50mm long and some M3 thread that you cut at the appropriate length.
So it's a bit fiddly until they release proper small CPU adapters for these.
Also to remove the heatsink that comes on the motherboard you need to run the board without fan until it heats enough to soften the heatpaste. Be careful to not rip the board when removing it, wooden icecream stick to bend might come useful.
They are following in ARM’s footsteps by having heterogeneous multi-core CPUs with high performance and low power cores (like the M1 and ARM’s big.little before that)
Intel’s Adler Lake will have a mix of Golden Cove cores for performance and Gracemont cores for power efficiency. Gracemont cores are improved Tremont cores previously found in their Atom line.
X86 here is a definite dead weight on its neck. Atoms front-end if few times bigger than the back-end.
"Empirical Study of Power Consumption of x86-64 Instruction Decoder"
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool...
From the conclusion:
"The result demonstrates that the decoders consume between 3% and 10% of the total processor package power in our benchmarks. The power consumed by the decoders is small compared with other components such as the L2 cache, which consumed 22% of package power in benchmark #1. We conclude that switching to a different instruction set would save only a small amount of power since the instruction decoder cannot be eliminated completely in modern processors."
2. Inefficient front-end taking toll on everything behind it contributes to the rest of the chip doing nothing except dissipating power.
3. While cores on modern SoCs take much less space than everything else usually, front-ends still eat into the die area.
4. Front-end dictates how the rest of the core behind it is designed. I believe that X86 technical debt absolutely must exert its toll on that, and overall transistor count in the back-end.
Here is an annotated die shot of Zen2 that shows it. https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/annotated-hi-res-core-d...
A very interesting path back to relevance for Intel would be to design proprietary absolutely crazy fast RISC-V cores and market them in the data center and HPC markets first. The tooling on Linux is about there. Eventually they could get an initially small but very loyal developer laptop market going too. A good RISC-V design could easily compete with the Apple M1.
Get enough momentum and a Windows port could happen. Then you could reboot the PC market.
The automotive and drone niches would be interesting too. There is a market there for low power high performance chips for things like driving assist and autonomy. A new instruction set wouldn’t matter much since the whole software stack is more or less custom anyway.
At the very least it would be a way to hedge in case X86 really does start to enter a death spiral.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not so easy that a few college kids could just whip one out. A company like Intel or AMD could definitely do it.
Designing any fast modern chip -- such as the Apple M1 -- probably still costs around a billion dollars.
In the RISC-V world the company with the most funding so far is SiFive and they've had $190 million.
Intel getting involved could change that very quickly.
- Part of a roadmap to RISC-V to eventually lure Arm customers uncomfortable with the Nvidia bid for Arm
- Generally hitting Arm at the lower end by giving RISC-V more credibility in the short term
- Open technology like RISC-V is less affected by the US rules for technology discussion/transfer with China
I understand people see that as a benefit of RISC-V, but I'm not seeing it quite here; how does that benefit Intel?
What is the compelling reason for going for RISC V compared to ARM or x86 when comes to general purpose computing?
I understand Intel wants to communicate that it is taking a direction but it seems to me that we are a long time away from seeing RISC V as the main computing architecture in a consumer laptop or a phone.
Arm64 and riscv64 are pretty close to equivalent in a technical sense for general purpose computing, especially once consumer ARM chips ship with SVE2 and RISC-V with their Vector extension (which are both going to be out at pretty much the same time).
Someone with a lot of money, such as Intel, investing in RISC-V will vastly accelerate RISC-V getting to being able to be used in a high end phone or laptop. Intel has the ability to "do an M1" with RISC-V, leapfrogging ARM.
Doing so, wouldn't they also help create a market where the barrier to entry is much lower than x86, thus inviting more competitors than they have now? It'd be interesting to see Intel on such a warpath against ARM...
Also, why would this lower the barrier to entry? Intel loves their margins. This will never change.
This effort is all about Intel fiddling with their 7nm process, not about moving to another architecture.
They might be able to match it on speed, efficiency, and price, but not on vertical integration. But I'm curious to see how a RISC-V ecosystem might develop once someone starts pumping heavy dollars into it.
I believe this will tend to put the right incentives when needed.
Why would intel do something that breaks x86/windows dominance? Why would Google/Qualcomm break arm/android?
I'm pretty sure a lot of Chinese big tech are willing to invest in semi conductor designs to keep more of the profit internally then send it to the US and prevent risk in their supply chains. You also see more and more Chinese big tech companies branch out of China so its not certain that windows and android can easily keep their monopoly.
This is not true. Airbus is an early example, and of course we can't forget to mention Huawei, Baidu or Alibaba.
I'd say defense industry as well, but since their customers are governments one may argue that their revenue would dry up when military spending is down
But you can definitely grow to a point where that's no longer necessary. That's why people got so terrified of Huawei: it wasn't that they were subsisting only on forced 'buy-domestic' orders from China, it was that they were able to produce products that were competitive enough for overseas customers to willingly buy them.
What about Intel’s execution over the last 5+ years gives you this confidence?