Comment by pstoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstoll | Hacker News Reader

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> The work would be a multi-person-year effort, requiring concomitant funding.

> It is not clear to me how this work might begin.

To me that screams for - develop interest in a US public sector (aka government) funding agency and start getting grants to do this type of work.

I assume RISC-V can reasonably be pitched to government tech & policy folks as having many directly applicable benefits to their set of problems in a way they may want to invest in. To procure RISC- systems, they’d probably want a bunch of verification done. If the community isn’t investing, maybe they would.

Caveat I’m not current on the state of RISC-V adoption in public sector systems. But I’ve done funded systems development work at start ups with DARPA/ARPA, InQTel, etc. A motivated party should be able to make this happen.

Anyone closer to RISC-V know what the state of adoption in public sector?

> To me that screams for - develop interest in a US public sector

I disagree 100%.

(note I'm a big fan of the RISC V effort)

First, the US government can/should seed pieces of fundamental technology that the private sector may later use, but in general you really don't want the government funding direct competitors to competitive technology already in the private sector (boosting RISC V when ARM, x86 etc are widely available). On a practical level, even if you do think the USG should do such a thing it won't happen.

Look at the members of RISC V International -- they are mostly huge multinationals who could both afford and benefit from such work. In fact the author of the post works for Intel. They are they people who should be paying for it (the smaller members, like Sifive, and mostly bleeding money).

There is one hack that could work, and might even be the most feasible: get DARPA to fund the pedagogical document acuster described. That to me is similar to previous successful research-supporting projects DARPA has funded in the past, such as SPICE. But that's a special case.

And anyway, why USG? Where are China and Europe in this? The EU funding this kind of pedagogical document would be a good step towards get its chip mojo back.

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