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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

A serious answer as to why I didn't answer the question directly?

The RISC-V community is dominated by a culture that is fighting the semiconductor war of 20 years ago. Consequently their core ideas are those that were in play then, and they remain steadfastly attached to them. In this case the sea of baby cores is actually an ideal application of RISC-V.

You cannot point out the core problem for a multitude of reasons, one of which is that if you did it would just turn to "prove it", and honestly another is that even though many of us would like an alternative ISA to succeed we do kind of enjoy watching people like SiFive spin round in circles. A strongly related problem is the likes of SiFive are promoting premature ossification before the thing has evolved to practical utility.

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I still don't really know what you are talking about. The only thing I am getting here is that standard ratification happened to fast? What standard extensions exactly were ratified to early?

So please, actually say what you mean and explain what mistakes were made, how things would be different if not for those mistakes.

> SiFive

Semiconductor is an old industry and getting started in it was always hard. That not ever company that does something with RISC-V is 100% successful all the time isn't really surprising or relevant. And SiFive by itself also doesn't have the power to push things threw.

> What standard extensions exactly were ratified to early?

This is part of why RISC-V has a problem: your question, as with the others, is wrong.

Why do we assume the whole core philosophy is actually correct? Why do we think that we can solve mistakes or omissions with extensions?

The underlying reality is you can’t. As the debates over some extensions are showing not all ISAs are equal (a myth promoted by Intel at length) and once you accept that a lot of the rest falls apart.

This is especially true if there is a core insight which your main competition are not telling you regarding the rest.

SiFive does not need to push things through, they damage things by promoting inertia. They are so effective at it it would be tempting to say it is a conspiracy.

I still don't understand what you are talking about.

> The underlying reality is you can’t.

But the actual real reality is you can ... because it was done and it is working pretty well.

> As the debates over some extensions are showing not all ISAs are equal

I don't know what that means. And even if I knew, 'equal' is irrelevant. The B extension and the V extension don't have to be 'equal' in any sense of the word I can think of.

> This is especially true if there is a core insight which your main competition are not telling you regarding the rest.

Again, what are you even talking about. You are never actual concrete. Do you believe there is a magical 'core' insight that ARM and Intel have? And if so why do you think non of the countless people involved in RISC-V that have worked all all these companies for the last 30 years don't know about it?

> SiFive does not need to push things through, they damage things by promoting inertia. They are so effective at it it would be tempting to say it is a conspiracy.

SiFive isn't in control. RISC-V International is gigantic with lots of members that have input. What you call 'inertia' I would call 'lots of hard work by lots of people to get the best outcome' and most people are pretty happy with the results and the progress.

The only possible thing I can think of that you might reference is Qualcomm attempted to take over, something that was not opposed by SiFive, but by literally everybody else. If you think they were right you can just say so.

And if it turns out Qualcomm is so uniquely brilliant and insightful they can publish their own extensions and because its so superior, people will adopt it. The same goes for anybody else.

> I still don't understand what you are talking about.

I see that. Sorry for wasting bandwidth hoping otherwise.

I don't understand either.

Seriously dude, is it so difficult to explain what you actually mean instead of talking around in circles?

Are you lot really this oblivious? Seriously?

Hey at least you were able to perform your dada in public.

And you get to insult people trying to help you. Well done, it won't happen again.

You know when multiple people are trying to tell you something, you could consider listening.

I agree that the RISC-V ecosystem has some issues that I hope will be sorted out. But not all RISC-V cores are "baby cores". I imagine that XiangShan [1], albeit student work, will spur work towards bigger, more performant OOO cores.

[1] https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

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