Hacker News Reader

Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Is ARM better than RiSC? How many RISC computers can I go buy right now at the local Carrefour here in Barcelona? Weird definition of “abandoning.”

View on HN

RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.

Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.

Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.

If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.

Both ARM and RISC-V are Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) instead of Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC aka x86) architectures. So it's more about the tooling that makes one better than the other. And like all open source, the tooling will be better over time as people and organizations recognize they get more back out of contributing to open systems.

That's way too optimistic. If it's like "all open source," it will have some improvements, forks and then nothing. There are only so many people who can contribute to chip development, and they all have jobs.

Wait. I thought the Musk-Trump regime was going to usher in a glorious post-scarcity economy based on the genius and purity of crypto?

LLVM and GCC succeed because it’s cheaper to add support to a couple open tools than build your own competing compiler.

I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com