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Comment by cinntaile | Hacker News Reader

Then your actual bet is that RISC-V based products will outperform products based on competing ISAs, no?

It may not overpower other ISAs but could be attractive from the cost-effectiveness perspective.

I meant outperform in a general sense. It could be on cost-effectiveness, especially for low-margin chips. It would mean he'd invest in companies that make this transition, but I expect almost all low-margin producers to make this shift. High-margin we're probably looking at proprietary ISA extensions that they don't open source.

The ISA is permissionless. You don't have to sign any legal documents, just download the specs, download some chip designs off github, and get going. The model is very different from x86 and Arm.

I am aware, the distinction doesn't affect my question.

They might, on the basis of it being an open unencumbered ISA that will see a lot of investment from parties trying to get rid of Intel/ARM dependencies.

Think of it a bit like what happened to JS. Being the open language the web runs, it saw immense competition from multiple particles and today we have a what should be a shitty dynamically typed prototype based scripting language outperform and outoptimize the likes of Java with its static classes and types in some scenarios.

I would be wary about comparing software to hardware in this way. Open source software is generally only successful in cases when it's a cost center not the actual end product.

I don't see how than can work when developing competitive CPU cores is extremely expensive. Why would anyone who does that make them free? (even licensing seems like a poor idea looking at ARMs business model).

Just as God intended

Is JS faster than java?

Also the web ecosystem is still basically a pile of shit on a few key metrics compared.to (say) boring Microsoft-land stuff a decade or 3 ago, so I'm not so sure if that's such a good argument.

Yeah. My thought is that RISC-V has the potential to be very competitive in terms of compute/watt and compute/$. At the very least versus x86, but hopefully also with arm

That's such a weak edge you might as well just buy TSMC/ASML or even Intel their fab business play works out.

I'd expect it would expand the market for customized SoC/microcontroller parts.

We know there's already a lot of "built to purpose" RISC-V products ending up in embedded environments. When you have less obligations to a restrictive ISA grant, you can make something that fits your needs exactly.

So the business case is second-order:

* As has repeatedly been joked, fab companies who aren't locked to a captive/capricious owner (Intel) look appealing. It likely isn't about cutting-edge there, but the flexibility to handle diverse custom orders. Plenty of these products will be like "133MHz and a couple hundred thousand gates" that would be fine on 90nm or bigger.

* Firms that can move from "product" to "consultancy". There's a lot of brilliant work in existing ARM and RISC-V MCUs, but will existing firms be able to move away from "here's a matrix of features, order from the list" and into "Let us meet with your team, build a custom pick-and-mix and add a bespoke unit to meet your need for (smaller number than was historically common) product-specific MCUs?"

Is there something unique to RISC that makes it inexpensive to manufacture custom chips?

Otherwise, I'd imagine the cost of the mask set and validation to far, far outweigh any reduction in unit cost you might see from a custom chip. MCUs are already extremely cheap, especially if you're buying significant quantities.

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