RISC-V needs more than an open architecture to compete
- Reference: 1652706009
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/16/riscv_world_domination/
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Take The Register 's [1]latest interview with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. It moved smartly through the gears on Intel's recent Platinum Membership of the open ISA consortium ("they're not too worried about their x86 business"), the interest from autocratic regimes (roughly "there are no rules, if some come up we'll stick by them"), and what RISC-V's 2022 will look like. Laptops. Thousand-core AI chips. Google hyperscalers. Edge. The plan seems to be to do in five years what took Arm 20.
RISC-V may not be an existential risk to Intel, but Arm had better watch it.
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That's a bold claim. Redmond is right to point to serious progress – getting buy-in from the industry is an outstanding achievement. RISC-V has earned its place as a contender, there's a buzz about it, and the ecosystem is building bit by bit.
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All this is necessary, but prosperity is still a way away. The processor market is a very strange place, and there's no real sign that RISC-V is packing a killer punch.
The challenge isn't one of technical competence or even of being a genuinely useful concept that does things its competition cannot. Both are true: RISC-V is shipping in numbers as embedded and SoC silicon, and it's the only ISA where designers are free to add or modify architectural features at the ISA level itself. Compared to the gargantuan market advantages of its two rivals, however, these seem like running shoes where jet boots are needed.
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Take Arm. In 2021 it licensed nearly 30 billion cores – four for every human alive – and made $2.7 billion. Which proves three things. There's a huge global appetite for advanced mobile and embedded cores, Arm absolutely owns that market's IP, yet that total domination doesn't make much money.
You might think $2.7 billion is a lot of money – and its [6]profit margin is nothing to sneeze at either – but it's only 0.6 percent of the $450 billion worldwide handset revenue, which, given its completely essential nature, is not a large chunk. It's only double the revenue of the other UK chip industry, [7]that of the British potato chip . If there's to be an upheaval of Arm's dominance, it won't be because there's piles of cash on the table.
[8]Only Microsoft can give open-source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to
[9]Privacy pathology: It's time for the users to gather a little data – evidence
[10]Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem
[11]Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro
There is a pile of cash in Intel's $80 billion annual haul, but that's because of the huge chip factories that Intel owns. Not up for grabs. What matters to RISC-V is that Intel has a very similar lock to Arm on its sector's ISA IP. And the ISA IP sectorization is very distinctive.
Intel and Arm are rulers of their own fiefdoms, ones which despite decades of trying to poach from each other have little overlap. Last year's Mac Mini M1 was the first mainstream Arm desktop computer since Acorn gave up the Archimedes fight in the early 1990s. You could write down all the Arm desktop PCs in the intervening decades on the back of a postcard. (No, the Raspberry Pi is not a mainstream desktop PC. We'll get to that later.)
As for Intel-based smartphones, choose that category if it comes up in a quiz. Ten minutes on Google and you'll be the undisputed world champion expert. Neither fiefdom has a runner-up, not even the ISA of the other side. There are no second places in the big processor markets. Incumbent inertia, the decades of momentum in sector tools, knowledge and installed base, combined with massive investment in innovation just to keep either fiefdom at bay, has turned the mainstream CPU market into two monopolies kept honest and energetic by each other. Want to compete with either? Good luck.
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For RISC-V to really prosper, it needs its own sector. AI/ML could be one; there are lots of accelerator designs which are nicely heterogeneous and the industry has yet to pick a winner.
IoT? Maybe, but that's no spring chicken. Gaming has gone through its experimental early stages and is locked into high-performance standard architectures. In truth, the big players are well positioned to divide any new sector between them.
Even if a new sector does appear, RISC-V has to have a major enabling factor. Open source doesn't provide enough financial or technical advantage – most OEMs will be licensing cores, just like with Arm, not designing their own. Modern SoCs can add a lot of architectural innovation without changing the ISA.
To be blunt, RISC-V needs price-competitive performance. A month ago, the VisionFive, the first RISC-V SBC, appeared. It's just like the Pi, only bigger, slower, and more expensive. The Pi created its own sector because it was smaller, faster, and much cheaper than its rivals. It was based on a Broadcom SoC, where years of fearsome competition in mobile phone technology will get you that advantage: RISC-V has nothing to leverage.
RISC-V's not going to be a huge success by out-Pi'ing the Pi. But it needs to out-something something, and in a really arresting way. It doesn't much matter what that something is, but without it, RISC-V will always be in second place where there's only room for first. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/07/riscv_ceo_seeks_world_domination/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YoJ1JMmjUOQSTQ57RbMYygAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/05/arm-delivers-record-revenues-and-record-profits-in-fy21
[7] https://www.statista.com/statistics/380152/crisps-retail-sales-value-great-britain-uk/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/09/only_microsoft_can_give_open/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/03/opinion_column_privacy/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/25/machine_learning_verification/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/19/twitter_faces_existential_threat_from/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YoJ1JMmjUOQSTQ57RbMYygAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I think you are failing to factor in the geopolitical aspect, there may well be a lot of companies that chose to use RISC-V, or are forced to by their governments, to avoid the risk of future sanctions.
Yes, and for the same reason there will be countries that will need to hinder the RISC-V business to avoid to give away an advantage to those under sanctions...
there may well be a lot of companies that chose to use RISC-V, or are forced to by their governments, to avoid the risk of future sanctions.
Or, of course, forced into using RISC-V because of sanctions by other governments.
China, India and others will have seen the impact of sanctions being applied to Russia and will have asked themselves what would happen if they were in the same boat.
Nato expansionism has properly upset the cart. I am not sure if the inevitable consequences were unforeseen or unintended.
The biggest catalyst for the adoption of RISC-V...
... has been Trump's tech trade dispute, which Biden seems to have continued. Alibaba's T-Head had their family of XuanTie processors by 2019 - they've sold in excess of 2.5 billion of them, apparently.
Perhaps a new iron curtain is being made of silicon, rather than clay. :/
Plenty of reasons to choose RISC-V
Control
In an increasingly divided world, regions are seeing the wisdom of digital sovereignty. China, the EU, Russia and smaller nation states, have all been talking about it, legislating for it, building it. RISC-V belongs to no one, and is available to everyone.
Stability
The Nvidia debacle - Arm was once considered to be the Switzerland of ISAs. Now its independence seems unsure, and its future... somewhat dodgy. The problem hasn't gone away either - Softbank are still wanting to sell off Arm, and who's to say a competitor company won't try to amass a controlling share?
Openness
People are recognizing the imperative for open knowledge, and tech transparency. And companies are seeing the advantage of collaboration. There's also a hungry consumer market for open hardware (and designers of proprietary RISC-V chips need to be mindful of that too).
Ease of use
The base of RISC-V is 47 instructions on a single side of paper (with no kinks or workarounds). University students have been using it for a decade. There's open source software available for design and verification, and even funding available too. Moreover, there's no prohibitive license agreement to haggle over and pay for, and no official body monitoring what you can and can't do - in fact, creativity is positively encouraged. In short, there seems to be little impediment for anyone to use RISC-V.
But none of these things would matter in the least if it turned out that RISC-V wasn't a decent instruction set. Industry luminaries such as Dave Jaggar and Jim Keller have endorsed it. Others have left lucrative, high-powered positions at OEMs to start-up RISC-V design companies. And it has been shown time and again that RISC-V can beat ARM designs on (their metric of) PPA.
- There's a boom in chip implementation at the moment, and RISC-V can go head-to-head in design of new silicon and, just possibly, produce solutions more quickly.
- China accounts for 20% of the tech market (and is one of the biggest manufacturers of tech) - it's moving over to RISC-V (and open source software) quickly. If other countries want to retain a piece of that market, then they'll need to produce goods which are US-IP free.
Re: Plenty of reasons to choose RISC-V
There's also a hungry consumer market for open hardware
The vast majority of consumers don't know what this is, nor do they give a shit. However, I have no doubt is would be possible to market-influence such a hunger into them. "Intel Inside"
Re: Plenty of reasons to choose RISC-V
India are also very interested in RISC-V as well, for all the reasons you state plus another one as well. The additional reason is that allows Indian companies to participate in the market on an equal footing to those of other countries. This will allow the Indian technology sector to grow without being subsidiary to the global plans or priorities made in other countries.
the other UK chip industry
Not chips! CRISPS, dammit!
Re: the other UK chip industry
Indeed, if you follow the link you see the correct word used in the Statista report.
Dear Rupert
I generally respect your long pedigree of articles and opinion pieces over the years, but you look in the wrong direction if you just compare the utility of an architecture to that of one capable of running a PC or flagship phone. There are trillions of MCUs running everything else for which Risc-V will be the deal platform. It can be argued that the evolution of this architecture is outstripping the largely add more local memory or make features smaller tinkering "evolution" of mainstream OS capable processors. We are looking forward to more innovative MCUs for use in smarter and innovative out of sight devices and it's going to be Risc-V that fills this environment. GM
Vision V??? I think the Sipeed Nezha RISC V SBC from last year must have a better claim to be first as it appeared last year. That is also expensive and slow.