Comment by zephen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zephen | Hacker News Reader

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Bleeding edge processor development is always going to be a patent minefield, even for RISC-V. Most patents are broad enough to cover more than one architecture.

But there are now several RISC-V IP vendors, and ARM can't possibly shut them all down, and companies can develop IP in-house, so there are lots of different designs already out there.

So, at this point, developing a RISC-V processor provides a certain amount of safety in numbers, kind of like swimming in a school of fish, while developing an ARM compatible processor paints a target on your back.

Developing a low-end x86 processor wouldn't attract any legal attention either, but now that the RISC-V ecosystem is big enough, why bother? Decoding all those instructions might be a lot of extra work for no real market share gain.

Developing a high-end x86 processor would probably attract careful scrutiny of exactly how you managed to get that performance and whether you violated any patents to do that. Again, that the same sort of patent scrutiny would happen with bleeding edge RISC-V, but certainly, a fast x86 processor would be higher on the priority list of the Intel and AMD legal departments.

Then RISC-V would need something like they did for open source software (in countries with barbaric IP), some sort of pool of defensive IP.

Because, if you look at the current trajectory of RISC-V micro-architectures: they will be competitive, so current hardware big tech will try hard to shut them down. If they are already at Zen3 performance... I run Zen2 and it's already beyond than enough (I miss AVX512 extensions though, hope we'll get often RVA cache line vector instructions on RISC-V).

Look at qualcomm already buying what seems to be a very good RISC-V microarchitecture, wonder what they will do to it (usually, they let it die slowly forcing their good engineers to work on something else).

The right way(TM) would be for ARM to "drop its ISA" and become a microarchitecture designer able to decode and run RISC-V ISA.

Intel and AMD should too. The world would be basically competing micro-archs all with high compatibility at machine code level.

And it seems nobody has been addressing the elephant in the room: x86 is an horrible ISA for a modern CPU, much more worse than RISC-V/ARM. It is only because AMD/Intel throw tons of money with tons of brains to make that horrible ISA performant AND because they are hogging the production capacity of the best silicon process.

There is zero wonders here.

There are two different categories of patent issues at play here, and several different implications for competition.

The first issue is on the purely physical level. The fabs (and integrated companies like Intel) fight this one out, and eye each others' patent stacks and maybe exchange a bit of money. This is not something the average Joe can worry about; nobody has the money to build the fab or engage in the chemical and materials research.

The second issue and implication is on the logic and circuitry level. The average Joe is not going to be able to design and test something really big and performant, but many companies (not just Intel, AMD, and ARM) are capable of this, and again, money might change hands, but (aside from things like China) absolute shutting down of competitors is not really going to happen.

So big players will dominate the highest performance market, but at least there are probably a dozen or so of them, so that will provide some pressure on its own.

Lower performance chips (some of which will be more than performant enough for many niches) will probably proliferate. The profit margin on these chips will be cutthroat, because the average Joe can design them, and then needs to negotiate with, e.g. TSMC, to actually build the damn things.

And a lot of innovation will happen in these lower-level chips as well. Expect many startups to be bought by the bigger players to enhance their own patent portfolios. And expect that their competitive prices will also drive down the cost of the most performant chips a bit.

The performance chip companies will have interesting choices to make. Lower the price to knock out the competition below? Or raise the price? If they raise the price too much, their available market will shrink, and then they'll need to raise the price even more.

Indeed, if NVIDIA or SAMSUNG go super performant RISC-V implementations, things are very probably going to change.

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