Comment by Lramseyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lramseyer | Hacker News Reader

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The year is 2012. Blender is an open source 3D modeling and CG software. There are hundreds of crummy plugins and hacks (and a handful of good ones,) whereas Maya is battle tested, developed by professional Autodesk engineers. It comes with good documentation and support. Blender documentation and tutorials were essentially youtube videos with cheesy electronic music in the background. (I'm probably getting some details wrong, but you get the point.)

You're not wrong in your assessment. However you're looking at it as it is right now, as opposed to where it's headed for in the future and what it could ultimately become. While CG and computer hardware are very different fields, the effects of communal knowledge sharing are very similar and very powerful. When bored high schoolers and broke college kids (and curious adults) can tinker with the tech, they enter the industry with that much more experience and/or have another avenue for career transition. And that is far more valuable than the mild (and sometimes nonexistent) conveniences of ARM over RISC-V.

Writing code for Blender != Developing a high performance core that is going to be fabricated on TSMC's leading edge process.

In the first case anyone with the right skills can do it. In the second you need access to lots of specialist tools / proprietary industry knowledge.

If RISC-V 'wins' in application processors it will be because an Intel or a Qualcomm invests (probably) hundreds of millions in building a team that works on a multi year project. It definitely won't be bored high schoolers.

Shockingly this is not strictly the case anymore and it's become less true everyday.

https://info.efabless.com/press-release-efabless-launches-ch...

130nm - that was leading edge 20 years ago.

That means we are only 20 years away from running everything on opensource hardware.

Who says you have to fabricate a RISC-V processor on leading edge TSMC nodes? What about FPGAs? What about older nodes? The whole point of my argument is that when you make the proprietary "industry" knowledge more generally available, more people can contribute to the ecosystem as it removes barriers to entry.

> In the first case anyone with the right skills can do it. In the second you need access to lots of specialist tools / proprietary industry knowledge.

In the first case, it used to require specialist tools like the Autodesk suite, and people had to have access to that software to develop the right skills and acquire the industry knowledge.

I don't think RISC-V "winning" is the right way of measuring success. Whether or not it becomes the dominant ISA for everything is irrelevant. It serves an important role in our market and it doesn't need the guys at Qualcomm and Intel to use it to make it successful. Either way Intel is investing big money into RISC-V: https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...

Also, careful what you say about high schoolers: https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/13-year-old-nicholas-sharkey-...

Fair enough and I don’t disagree at all but I do think it’s a bit different to software development on that there is probably a limit to how far you can go without one firm spending serious money. As you say it may be Intel - which doesn’t really give me a warm glow.

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