Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

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> you'd have your Tencents and Apples of the world pouring resources into it

The Tencent and Apple of the world are...Tencent and Apple.

If Amazon say decided to throw billions at developing a Graviton 4 using RISC-V...they really couldn't leverage much of their previous Graviton development work. They also wouldn't have a deep bench of low level RISC-V wunderkind to bring on board to leverage the new platform. It's a chicken and egg problem.

Why would Amazon then want to pay to bootstrap a whole RISC-V market? That's a lot of CapEx without a clear potential for returns. You'll note they did develop Graviton using the ARM ISA so they didn't have to create from whole cloth a "Graviton" market.

Amazon made the same decision as PC makers in the 80s. They consolidated around the IBM clone architecture to take advantage of the rest of the market, especially Microsoft and IBM, supporting the IBM clone market. Commodore, Atari, and Apple all had to fight uphill against IBM clone market.

I haven't seen any technical advantage of RISC-V over ARM that would suggest it's worth pouring billions of development dollars into. It might make sense for Western Digital for drive controllers but not phone, tablet, PC, or server makers.

AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc. and creating a SoC, which is manufactured by someone else. Even this is no walk in the park, I'm sure Amazon has hundreds(?) of engineers working on Graviton.

Now, if someone would create a RISC-V core competitive with the Arm server cores, and an ecosystem of RISC-V compatible peripherals (well, not compatible in the sense that some random peripheral would need to care about the ISA, but that Arm might not want to licenses their peripherals to a RISC-V based project?) shows up, I'm sure Amazon could do roughly the same with a hypothetical RISC-V Graviton. But if you're talking about designing a RISC-V core from scratch, that's a whole different ballgame.

> AFAIU all the Graviton chips so far are using off the shelf cores licensed from Arm. What Amazon is doing is assembling a shopping list of cores, peripherals (probably also to a significant extent licensed from Arm rather than a 3rd party or even in-house) etc.

This is my point. Amazon using ARM lets them tap into the huge ARM ecosystem with minimal investment on their part. The cores they're using have known qualities and meet whatever performance targets they want.

At this point RISC-V doesn't have that same ecosystem. It doesn't even have extant high performance cores someone can just order. Building momentum is expensive. If selling that ecosystem isn't your main business it's probably not worth investing millions or billions to develop it.

> I haven't seen any technical advantage

RISC-V has geopolitical advantage however in that it's not controlled by US/UK.

I can see why Amazon wouldn't pay to bootstrap that, but I can see why Tencent/Huawai/Alibaba would try to.

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