As an advocate for FOSS Software, I cant tell you how excited I am for RiscV 😍

@heckyes

Жыл бұрын

Same!

@SeanBZA

Жыл бұрын

Yes and remember as well WD also uses another older technology on the silicon as well, in there being an embedded 6502 processor, with 64k of ROM and RAM, which is used to bootstrap the main processor, feeding in the configuration file and doing housekeeping, as the core is now royalty free to use, and there is a lot of tools to develop for it, and it is both also RISC, and also incredibly small as well, fitting well in the RISC architecture. So small you can fit it into a ultra cheap processor sold as a toy.

@tonysheerness2427

Жыл бұрын

The only thing that could be the fly in the ointment is that 486 and ARM have a standard that is controlled and understood. Risc-V is already split into two closed and open. Who will control compatibility?

@seguramlk

Жыл бұрын

All of us my friend 🎉

@dieSpinnt

Жыл бұрын

@@tonysheerness2427 RISC-V Foundation will do that ... btw, that (standardization, research, promotion, providing resources and training) is their purpose and right to exist:) Don't forget that RISC-V itself IS the base layer providing compatibility. Anything else YOU invent and introduce to the platform (and that freely, which isn't a thing with X86 & ARM) is surplus, a gift or a relief. How could you possibly see that as something bad (like you asking in that direction)? With more, free and open diversity there will come opportunities! No offense or accusation: It is only ones OWN confusion and fears (based on unfamiliarity with the topic?) that gives this unfounded feeling of negative consequences. (This problem exists not only with processor-ISAs ... sadly).

Many of us are old enough to remember “closed” network protocols, such as NetBEUI (Microsoft), Token Ring (IBM) and AppleTalk (Apple, obviously). All have disappear and TCP/IP, the open protocol is now dominant everywhere. There is no reason why an open ISA won’t dominate in the future.

I am looking forward to more variety in the processor market. It was an interesting time in the early 90s with Sun Sparc, Intel, MIPS, Motorola 680x0, PowerPC and Dec Alpha. It also seems we have much more flexibility today with Linux in that it is easily ported.

@willb1242

Жыл бұрын

Great point!

@cdl0

Жыл бұрын

Yes, this! BTW, you forgot HP PA-RISC and Itainium. Except for "Itanic", I have used all of them.

@TheRus13

Жыл бұрын

@@cdl0 Elbrus CPU...

@LackofFaithify

Жыл бұрын

You say that, but, just look at the Snap vs flatpak vs etc... situation. The open source community is already at a pretty maxed capacity just doing things for different linux flavors on the SAME architecture. How will adding 10-15 more CPUs with different and non-standardized instruction sets benefit anyone outside of those with the money to pay people to make software for their specific platform? And yes, risc-v has stuff in theory to make things have basic minimums to prevent fragmentation but those have not produced the desired results, its uniform only on the most idealistically written marketing webpage.

@cdl0

Жыл бұрын

@@TheRus13 Oh yes, a super-rare one, even more exotic than the Itanium! I never got my hands on one of these, as well. Another legend lost in the mists of time was the Transputer. I have seen these demonstrated, but never used one.

This explains RISC V in simple terms, very easy to understand as always the case for this channel. Thanks.

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

You're very welcome!

@jimatperfromix2759

Жыл бұрын

Yes, Kamol, I agree that this was an excellently done video, and I appreciate it very much. I especially like that it's being put out relatively toward the beginning of 2023, so that we have some kind of high-level overview of what RISC-V developments we might anticipate this year. I agree with others sentiments that this sort-of feels like another "birth era" in the computer industry (or perhaps "rebirth" would be a better adjective). It kind-of has the warm-fuzzy feelings somewhat similar to the historical mid-70s feel of the hobbyist S-100 bus market in which literally thousands of hobbyists participated in some small way or another in the road along which the MITS Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080 (and some 6502 and Motorola 680x0 architectures) gradually morphed into the goal that some of us had at the time, namely a "personal computer" in every home. We weren't so prescient as to anticipate a "personal computer" in every pocket and in every car dashboard. The winners of that first round of personal-computer development were arguably those companies whose business-management acuity was greatest (and some would argue those who were just the darn best at turning the business idea of the personal computer into a profit-producing monopoly) such as the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs visionaries of the world. A side effect of the topsy-turvy growth of the industry is that the instruction set architecture for Intel/AMD x86-64, although powerful, is just a horrible messy nightmare, such that we should probably have special custom shrinks to provide psychiatrist help to those poor slobs who are still stuck writing x86 code at the assembler level. ARM came along later, so was a bit less terrible than x86. We see the current benefits in Apple M2 chips being able to accomplish the same amount of work at power levels much lower than equivalent x86-64 CPUs (although the $ cost might still be more expensive due to Apple's pricing philosophy). But time and time again it has been proven that for doing equivalent tasks using much less power, RISC beats CISC (unless you can design a custome CISC chip for your particular mix of instructions - which nobody ever does). There's really only about half-a-dozen major categories of instructions (and cross that orthogonally with various data types and sizes-in-bits-or-bytes) in a standard CPU core, and now that we've kinda-sorta figured out multithreading more-or-less sufficiently, it's almost always more efficient chip-die-real-estate-wise to have a simpler, more-orthogonal instruction set (that is, more toward the RISC end of the spectrum) than to waste a lot of die space on interpretting and executing huge instructions that are rarely used in practice. A better approach these days to rare instructions is to have a very-fast function call mechanism to something that, by default, is implemented in software, but if needed is special cases can be implemented as add-ons to the core RISC ISA so as to run really fast in hardware This approach would also probably be best for GPU architectures. We went all the way around the horn and made tens of billions for Nvidia (and mere billions for AMD and Intel) in making discrete GPUs, only to find out that this sort of thing would be best incorporated as optional parts of a CPU chip that shares the same memory space as the rest of the CPU (such as in the AI engines now incorporated in Apple chips and some specific 7040-series AMD chips). I can see the industry possibly marching even more in this direction under the umbrella of RISC-V.

RISC V seems rather promising and I love general openness of the architecture.

@thesenamesaretaken

Жыл бұрын

@@new-lviv the most dystopian OS is Windows 11

@Zeitgeistpionier

Жыл бұрын

Every kind of knowledge should be open and free for everybody! It's a shame that one has to pay for example for ISO- oder DIN-Definition-Documents or for learning materials that could be hosted and downloaded practically for free.

@klaxoncow

Жыл бұрын

@@new-lviv Yes. This is a phenomenon also known as "freedom". Freedom is always a bit messy, offering too many choices. Leading to inevitable fragmentation. But, like, some might challenge that, well, that's kind of the point. That's what freedom is. That this is the definition of freedom. To make your own choices. And for that choice to be a real choice, it needs to be a free and open choice - which necessitates a wide array of possibilities. And, with everyone making their own varying choices, this inevitably leads to fragmentation. The underlying argument being that this is not a bug. It's a feature. It's supposed to look like this.

@jimtekkit

Жыл бұрын

@@thesenamesaretaken Everyone always says that about the current Windows OS. The entire community was in an uproar when Windows 10 came out, totally different to the positive sentiment today.

@thesenamesaretaken

Жыл бұрын

@@jimtekkit I can't speak for 10 because I never used it. What I can say is, having moved straight from 7 to 11, that there is a lot about it that makes me cringe, as if they deliberately looked for bad parts of the smartphone ecosystem and brought those to the desktop. If it weren't for work and education I would abandon windows entirely at this point.

Updates in RISC - V field are surely needed. As an open source enthusiast, RISC V getting better with time always feels enticing.

FPGA as RISC-V is possible as well guys. the cores are on opencores. If you already work with FPGA's, this could be interesting for you

@patrikgubeljak9416

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, at my job we make makes SoCs for industrial controllers and sensors. We're looking to make our own eFPGAs for the signal processing, ideally on the same chip as the sensor.

@jnelson4765

Жыл бұрын

There's $15 FPGA dev boards that can run a RISC-V soft core at 100 MHz - granted it's the stripped down embedded processor, but more than enough to replace most microcontrollers.

@el-domo

Жыл бұрын

Guys .. look what we saw found out today, a mobile RISC-V platform based on FPGA. look for Mr Iot tech

Hey people, Chris is closing in on a million subs. Let’s push this spectacular channel through that number and way, way past it!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, appreciated. :)

@NisseOhlsen

Жыл бұрын

done

@MichelMorinMontreal

Жыл бұрын

This recognition would be greatly deserved!

@Remigrator

Жыл бұрын

Only 1 million? That is an outrage! This channel should have at least 1 BILLION viewers!!

@soulextracter

Жыл бұрын

​@@Remigrator A channel generally have more viewers than subscribers. Remember that most popular channels tend to ask their viewers to subscribe because as they say: "60% of our viewers aren't subscribed". Most people just watch a new video when it gets recommended and don't subscribe at all.

RISC-V is fascinating. I hope these kind of update videos continue to do well on your channel because I always appreciate and look forward to them. For example, I always look forward to your quantum computing updates. Looking forward to your next video!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Perry. Views "permitting", I hope to now post a RISC-V annual update each March, just as I have done a quantum computing update in August for many years now.

@perrymcclusky4695

Жыл бұрын

@@ExplainingComputers Yes, definitely views permitting. Also, permit me to say, I liked the visuals of you talking to the audience with computer and video tech stuff on both sides of you on the table. Impressive young Jedi!

Great summary and insights. This is another aspect of how "computing" has become a commodity, and requires global equalisation (so not owned, directed, or defined by any one entity or country).

@kyleolson8977

Жыл бұрын

Historically there hasn't been a problem with ARM. It's been very, very cheap to license and has not been limited.. For the most part if you're making chips the cost of ARM should be largely meaningless. Open source not necessary for anyone in the business and RISC-V would have died off. But China is trying to get around trade sanctions. RISC-V is pretty much entirely about the very unequal entity of China. That's what this is about, not any high-mindedness.

@l0g1cseer47

Жыл бұрын

Global trade balance is the way.

@yumri4

Жыл бұрын

Well if you like at the internet public statistics 1/2 of all users are on phones. So when they get a new phone and it has RISC-V as long as everything they use works as normal barely anyone will care. The problem will be when you get to the server market as almost everything is made for x86. To my knowledge they will not change from what they use unless there is a good reason to change. Then you have the desktop market. As almost everything is made for x86 or x86_64 moving to RISC-V or even Microsoft trying to move to ARM is a problem as almost everything designed for desktop is made for x86.

@awuma

Жыл бұрын

@@kyleolson8977 So is RISC-V a threat to the US and NATO? As a Pole, Canadian and Brit, that would concern me very much. Could it lead to defeating the power of Western sanctions on bad actors?

Greetings from across the pond near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. As we say in Texas (my home state), "DANG, Prof. Barnatt -- that was a fantastic update on RISC-V. Somebody throw me a towel!" It's like eating three big steaks at once, and now I need time to digest it all. Don't know about others, but I'm slowly getting more and more excited about RISC-V, especially since quite a few government agencies and corporations are getting on board. I really want to get a RISC-V SBC, but my instincts tell me to wait a bit longer for a much better payoff, so I'll wait -- but not much longer!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Many thanks for this support -- most appreciated. :) As you say, RISC-V SBCs will go on improving, and rapidly. The barrier to their use right now is already software, not hardware . . . but it will get there, as there is a lot of community support and interest.

I'm mostly interested the lowish power (W) embedded platform SBCs where size, low power, price, and support are more important than raw speed. The RPi filled that while they were available... so sad what has happened.

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

I think your interest matches that of most makers. I'm now planning a video that will try to bring together what has happened in the maker SBC space, why, and where we may go next. Stay tuned! :)

@builder396

Жыл бұрын

Wait, something happened to those little things?

@davidpodeszwa7010

Жыл бұрын

@@builder396 well, kinda, the company raspberry pi foundation saw an opportunity to make loads of money and instead of selling to makers, learners and enthusiasts they have now prioritized selling them to big companies for automation (as its a perfect product for automation etc.)

I agree.....the world is changing faster than ever after COVID. More of us are looking at availability of our future supply chains for equipment and software and FINALLY!!! We are starting to plan ahead. I think RISK-V is going to play a big part in the computing world.

Nice it's Sunday finally Love watching your stuff because you work hard

Note that May 2011 "RISC-V" is very different from and incompatible with 2015's RISC-V 2.0. What was published in 2015 (RV{32,64}IMAFDC) is still compatible with RISC-V today and forever into the future -- just more features are being added on with time, but the core things will never change.

An excellent update and some great insight Chris. Thank you! Also, nothing lasts forever, as there are always new entrants into the IT space, Remember when Commodore, Atari, Sinclair et al seemed untouchable?,

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for support. And yes, I remember the Commodore/Atari/Sinclair days very well. Things do always move on.

@annebokma4637

Жыл бұрын

​@@ExplainingComputers looking back always makes me regret I am not a hoarder 😢😂

Another fantastic video! No one else explains computers like ExplainingComputers!

Appreciate the update on RISC-V. It seems to be evolving rapidly and feels a little like the early days of Linux adoption. Have a coffee on me! ;)

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for your support, most appreciated. :)

Chris, I've been following your channel for years and your clear, concise manner has never failed to impress me. Thank you.

Anyone else think that the "cluster" platform at 10:30 seems pretty bloated like me? I like SBC clusters that maintain a compact size and don't cost a fortune just for the backplane PCB. And the horizontal RPi compute modules just create huge layouts.

On the desktop side of things, the rise of mini-PCs says everything. The modular tower is on the way out, as you've already discussed. I also hope RISC-V leads to a significant de-bloating of operating systems and software. Using web browsers everywhere for everything has led to a significant degredation of our standards for software, and a phenomenal waste of processor cycles (and thus, energy and time).

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Agreed.

@K9TheFirst1

Жыл бұрын

I just worry about what this means for the more enthusiast and pro-sumer markets, where being able to build a machine that is exactly what you want in terms of specs and hardware is dominant. I just recently built my first server, and I don't think I would be able to do that if everything is SOCs and MiniPCs.

@Demopans5990

Жыл бұрын

@@K9TheFirst1 Socketed SOCs with support for PCIE expansion is technically possible. Run the power efficient graphics on the soc, and when the extra omph is needed, the external GPU spins up. RAM might still be as it is, with SOC ram acting closer to cache than RAM.

@OpenGL4ever

Жыл бұрын

I have to strongly disagree. The modular Midi Tower has two main advantages over SOCs and MiniPCs. 1. It can be used to cool off enormous amounts of energy without the computer becoming too loud. This cannot be done with an SOC and an SOC would always be significantly slower than such a cooled high-end computer in a midi tower. 2. You can upgrade the Midi Tower super cheap. I only have to replace the motherboard, the CPU and the RAM, I can mostly continue to use the rest. I've been doing it this way for many years now and it's the most cost-effective solution to have a lot of power and a sufficiently up-to-date computer at the same time. The SoC serves niches. As a secondary computer e.g. It's okay to watch Netflix, but a SoC will never displace my main computer in the Midi Tower. This is not possible just because of point 1.

Really good video, Christopher. Easy to understand explanations, well documented with links (we used to say "footnoted"). Ever since the early 1970's when I started building early computers using available microprocessors (Z80, 8008, M6800, CDP1802, etc.), I was told that RISC was "right around the corner". Well, here we are, and it appears we have finally found the corner...I think. Thank you for researching and documenting RISC progress. I am not sure I completely understand the advantages of RISC (other than the licensing issues), but I am confident you will teach me as we head down RISC highway. 😁

@schrodingerscat1863

Жыл бұрын

RISC has been a major technology for quite some time now, there are more ARM cores out in the wild than all other processors combines. RiscV is just a processor instruction set standard based on RISC that is open source meaning no licensing costs to those who wish to implement it in silicon. The disadvantage is that ARM provides core designs that can easily be integrated into SoC designs. With RiscV you are on your own.

@klaxoncow

Жыл бұрын

The "R" in ARM stands for "RISC", by the way. Originally, the "Acorn RISC Machine", as it was created by Acorn in the UK. But then - in a joint venture with Apple (who'd used the ARM chip in their Newton product) and VLSI - they founded a new company for its further development, and as Apple and VLSI were also involved there, then the Acorn in the ARM name was substituted and, for the company, ARM stood for "Advanced RISC Machine". These days, the acronym officially stands for nothing. It's just a name and is no longer considered to be an acronym for anything. But, yeah, the ARM was born in the '80s in the Acorn Archimedes. I used one at school, when I was a kid. (And, truth is, though modern x86 chips still present a CISC instruction set for compatibility's sake, it's really a RISC chip, running microcode, under the hood and has been for a long time now. It just presents a CISC instruction set to the outside world, for "backwards compatibility", but its internals are actually RISC.)

The most important difference between RISC and CISC is that RISC can be implemented using mostly hard wired instruction decode and execution rather than make use of a micro code processor. This allows a higher throughput per clock cycle than a microcoded processor. Many CISC processors do make use of a fair amount of hard wired instruction decode and execution thanks to increased transistor counts. Still, the RISC style of hardware is easier to implement on a low power processor than CISC.

@cdl0

Жыл бұрын

Well done for pointing this out. Thank you for saving me the trouble of making the same comment.

@johnhunt1725

Жыл бұрын

CISC only made sense in the early days of computing, when memory and storage where very expensive and highly limited in capacity, and power consumption was basically inconsequential. The emphasis was on making your compiled executables as small as possible. In today's computing world, those things are reversed.

@KennethScharf

Жыл бұрын

@@johnhunt1725 CISC also makes sense if you are going to write your code in Assembler. Many CISC instruction sets are really like high level languages. As compilers evolved, it became easier to 'translate' high level language code into RISC instruction sets. I'd wager that very little ARM code is actually written in assembler (except for low level initialization routines), and that most ARM software is actually written in C, Ada, Python, or other high level languages.

@cdl0

Жыл бұрын

@@johnhunt1725 Yes, this was the working hypothesis. When real RISC processors were released in the wild, it was found that real code density was very much better than feared, and barely worse than CISC. The reason is that RISC ISA's necessarily provide efficient, orthogonal machine codes for compilers.

@johnhunt1725

Жыл бұрын

@@KennethScharf 🤔Does anyone write anything for any platform in assembler anymore? I wouldn't be surprised if it's no longer a BS in CS degree requirement these days.

I think you're spot on with your closing statement. It feels to me like RISC-V has hit critical mass now so it'll be big, the question is how big. My guess is that it'll eat into Arm more than x86 at first, that just feels like a natural target for it.

Absolutely spot on Chris. RISC-V is the most exciting thing to happen in computing for decades. As someone who started getting interested in computers in the 70's and grew up during the personal computer boom of the 80's I have often felt that the field has become stale, samey and uninteresting. Personal computing has become obsessed with how many FPS can be reached in the latest games (and how much the GPU's cost to do it ! 😲) while supercomputing has become obsessed with how many x86 cores can be squeezed into a 19" rack. RISC-V has the very real potential to be a total game-changer. People who focus on the current state of RISC-V development are myopic and don't understand how Intel grew from a small company producing the 4004 into the behemoth it is is today. Sure, RISC-V isn't ready for prime time yet but it is advancing rapidly and this will only be accelerated by a geopolitical environment where people don't want to be at the mercy of American IP or Chinese fabrication plants, including the danger of China taking control of the Taiwanese fabs. The other major, and equally important factor is cost - companies pay huge sums to Intel/AMD and ARM to use their designs and it is a commercial no-brainer if you can avoid those fees by using an open source ISA even if you have to invest money up front for development. Finally, we are back in exciting times in the world of computing the like of which we haven't seen since the early 90's. 👍😁

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

I think we are kindred spirits here. Great post! Thanks for sharing. :)

Risk V seems to be moving extremely fast compared to how other ISA's did (and are). I'm excited for the day we can launch an application and simply snap cores and accelerators together for a small batch of CPU's and/or MCU's, like we can today with multi-layer PCB's. Thanks for your thoroughness and another well presented and detailed video, Chris!

I enjoyed your expansion of view! Great vid as always.

Excellent updates on the RISC-V world! Thanks for all of your research for the update and overview of the architecture's history. I love how clearly you always present information and make it accessible to wide audiences (including the geekier types :P). Thank you.

Thanks Chris! The view through your crystal ball is always entertaining (as well as thought provoking and insightful).

Thank you for your thoughtful and informative dissertation re the state of RISC-V technology in 2023. 👍 It's a refreshing change from the (mere) regurgitation of numbers and/or static comparisons between existing pieces of hardware that one might find elsewhere.

So exciting! Thank you for keeping us informed. I've very much enjoyed your Risc-V update.

Interesting video. Hope RISC-V will follow the same success story like Linux. It is always better to have more choices. One day it may become another interesting SBC like Raspberry Pi.

@jimmihenry

Жыл бұрын

What success? 0.001% of the desktop market 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣!

@rgbii2

Жыл бұрын

@@jimmihenry While it is a small percentage, it is growing. It's about 2.94%, slightly higher than Chrome OS. Up from 2.19% a year ago. Windows dropped about 4% during that same period.

@jimmihenry

Жыл бұрын

@@rgbii2 I tired Linux.Linux Puppy for a older laptop, oh boy what a journey! Had to scratch the boot loader from another revision, i accidentally downloaded a Japanese version to get the grub, well it was 3 am spend hours on that build... Because i am stubborn i made it. I also installed Arch it was way smoother, but only on a virtual machine. Linux is not a suitable daily rig OS sadly. Not even Ubuntu that spy's on you like Billy G. (G like gangster 🤣)

@awuma

Жыл бұрын

@@jimmihenry Depends a bit on hardware and distribution. Some 22 years ago I had no problems at all installing Redhat to dual boot on an IBM T20, and it has gotten to be much simpler since then e.g. with Ubuntu. It's essentially automatic now, and much the same goes for PC's. One slightly nasty thing to note is that current installers on big distributions such as Ubuntu won't work on very old x86 CPU's; you need to find a distribution which supports old hardware. As for daily use, the Linux ecosystem supports just about everything you are lilkely to do, and there are several ways to run Windows things if need be. Note that Linux will mount Windows filesystems, and packages such as Libre Office have good format conversion utilities. I have used Linux for 99% of everything I do since 1995. Distributions have included Slackware, Redhat, Distro Astro, Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE (not forgetting Raspbian on the Pi), the choice is vast. In nearly thirty years I can remember paying for only one application, an Excel-like spreadsheet called Xess, and after 25 years the binary can still run on current Ubuntu (with a little hacking of the install script).

@sethbrown1763

Жыл бұрын

@@jimmihenry Hmm, I've been using Linux since around 1995. Nowadays, I have it running on most of my machines and on my wife's laptop. My children also use Linux both at home and at work. I have supported Linux both on servers and desktops from over a decade, in addition to Linux-based PBX systems. YMMV, as the Yanks say, but if you measure the success of Android which runs on top of a Linux kernel, you can hardly say that Linux has been a failure. I would gently suggest that your own personal experience does not define the success of Linux.

RISC V looks very promising indeed. Thanks for another great video Chris.

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Greetings Steve. :)

...superb video again, chris...the technical in addition to the appraisal needs to consider!...

Thanks for giving us a broader view of the path/s of development that RISC 5 is moving towards. You’re certainly correct in your assertion that chips will dominate national security priorities/concerns for all the technically advanced nations; in their forthcoming struggles for self-security and supremacy of market/s control. Always prescient in your observations, much appreciated.

Nice to see RISC-V gaining steam. Thanks for the video!

Quite an eye opener. I remember eeading about RISC in byte magazine during 90s Very happy to see these recent developments all explained in such a clear way. Thx for posting.

Good review, I don't think I can pack my thoughts in a single comment but I'll try 😊 1. ISA itself is open, but as you mentioned it all boils down to IP related to manufacturing of the cores. For non-US countries it gives some freedom out of embargo etc, as long as they can create and manufacture effective core 2. Even with free ISA I'm sure there are lot of patents that can create a mess during manufacturing of the CPU 3. With AMD, NVidia and other fabless companies they still risk a lot being tied to TSMC 4. I think that success in server computing will depend if AWS, Azure or Alibaba will be able to deliver a cost effective solution, with the last one having most incentive in being US independent 5. Desktop computer is another beast. On one hand we only need web browser today, on the other Windows is still strong especially in corporate computing and as long as MS will not cut ties with Qualcomm we are not going to get anywhere 6. EU has its own issue. Having only STM and being "green" by manufacturing CPUs in Asia now we need to acknowledge that is not as green and still start doing it within EU borders. A pill quite hard to swallow

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Great post. An agreed! In particular, a very good point on the server space / cloud providers. And on the EU . . .

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

Server != cloud != big 5 cloud providers. Adding another architecture will be easy for the big 5 than for pourer players. Europe also has NXP. Fabless production is the great enabler for new designs, TSMC monopoly is a problem compared to back when chips like 6502 could use an ecosystem of competing fabs that didn't own particular gate and transistor designs elements .

Awesome accompanying thoughts about the technical jump from Vision5 1 to the Vision5 2 👍

Excellent update. I look forward to following what happens to RISC-V.

Great Video! Very informative and intersting!! Great job Chris!

Peter another great evening spent watch new and exciting video again love you approach to explaining computer easy to understand thanks Mike

Thank you Chris for explaining RISC V so well.

Thanks so much for the excellent video and extra thanks for the LINKS! ❤

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

:)

An excellent overview of the RISC-V landscape.

Outstanding analysis, Chris, much appreciated, thanks!!

Thank you Chris, very well explained

NIce insights and updates Chris, thanks for your awesome sunday programming! :)

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

My pleasure!

A new master class on the future of RISC V architecture. Thank you very much!

@protocetid

Жыл бұрын

have a like from me for your avatar

Another fascinating video! Thanks!

Great video as always Thanks for this overview and look into the future Thanks for sharing 🙂

Well thought out, professionally presented and extremely interesting.

Brilliant work as always Sir!!

I'm sold on RISC-V! Not only is it open but the instruction set has a simple and elegant look to it. It definitely lends itself to parallel processing.

Thank you Chris for an interesting Sunday video, it's exciting & good to have healthy competition against X-86 & ARM (give them a bit of a kick). Risc-V will no doubt mature in a few years time & with some of the big tech companies behind it, it will spillover into end user devices whatever they may be!!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Allan, your support is appreciated. :)

Excellent video Chris as you've been an early advocate of Risc-V so its exciting to see the adoption expand into SBCs as the MCUs are great! 👍

Very interesting review, as always!

great video as always !

thank you for the excellent explanations and updates on embedded stuff

Another top grade report. Thank you.

As always, plenty to think about. And it should be interesting to see what you'll be talking about this time in 2024.

Thank you for the update. RISC-V is a game changer. Best wishes.

I always feel slightly smarter after watching your videos Chris. Cheers

Excellent summary. As usual thoughtful and clearly presented.

This video answered many questions I had, thanks.

@ExplainingComputers

9 ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks Chris. Another great video, on a topic that I believe will be getting more and more exposure, probably from you too.

A good development! I remember all the historic architectures like MOS Technology MC6502/6510 and the PDP-11 by DEC but what I really loved was the MC68000 of Motorola in my Amiga computer. It was amazing and I was really able to write everything in assembler what I could imagine. Just time was the limit.😊

Thanks for keeping me posted)

Looking at those press announcements, my (albeit perhaps optimistic) suspicions are that soon you'll have to do these bi-yearly, and then quarterly. Possibly before this year is out :) The big advantage for x86 and ARM is that they have already done a lot of heavy lifting for decades to find optimisations. Whereas the advantage of RISC-V is also, ironically, that x86 and ARM have done a lot of the theory of heavy lifting to find optimisations - not so much in untransferable proprietary code, but in the failures, procedures and methodology, and in many cases those workflows can be directly applied and so streamline the catch-up process. ML optimisation will also be a big thing in that regard. It's been a long road for x86 and ARM, but when you approach the limits of physics with little more to eek out of a single core without scalability issues, and all you're really doing is optimisation, then you can do little else but watch the underdog catch up. So, the end of that long game, and maybe not that long now, is not whether x86 and ARM will ultimately be faster - by any useful margin, but whether they're seen as cost effective, given their licensing. After all, in a double blind test, once the dust has settled on experimentation of recipes, can you _really_ taste a quantitative quality reduction from Kellogg's Corn Flakes to Supermarket X's own brand? Or is the only significant difference in your pocket?

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for this. More regular updates may indeed be needed! :)

@Waccoon

Жыл бұрын

The real problem is that x86(x64) is designed for a different market than RISC-V. x86 has a stupidly complicated instruction format, but the instruction decoding process is a drop in the bucket compared to the hardware needed for high-performance computing, and x86 does that really well. If x86 didn't have such a deeply entrenched ecosystem, a "cleaned up" x86 instruction format could be developed that would absolutely destroy everything in the high-performance market. RISC-V is reasonably simple, but it just can't compete at the high-end due to major compromises to satisfy the low-cost embedded market. Having read the RISC-V whitepapers, it's obvious the ISA was not designed for performance applications, and I doubt it will ever be competitive in that market, which is a shame. RISC-V is generating excitement because it's cheap, and it's possible that will affect consumer prices by a penny or two. It'll take something else to dethrone the dominance of x86/ARM in the PC and server market. ARM will be around for a long time, as it's the certification and verification tools that really matter when you're developing a complete system, and RISC-V can't (and will never) hold a candle to that.

@IngieKerr

Жыл бұрын

@@Waccoon Excellent points, Waccoon. Many I'd not fully considered. I think a lot of possibilities still lie in multicore RISC-V. Tho this massively multicore space is GPU space more than CPU space, it'll still be interesting where edge [in both senses of extraneous and edge computing] cases lie. NVIDIA has stated replacing Falcon with RISC-V, and I think RISC-V does perhaps sit in this middle ground, somewhere between CPU and GPU, which, for ML TPU driven development, might be an interesting space. The Esperanto ET-SoC-1 being perhaps the biggest/fastest proposal in this space so far. And while I certainly don't doubt your arguments and research here, I guess I'm just more optimistic about things we don't know yet :) In that the more these get pushed out to research markets, the more unexpected use cases/modifications will appear. Either way, it's going to be fun to watch, and will push all markets, that's the main thing :)

Great survey of the tech frontier! Thanks for your views!

Very well done video, thank you very much

Very thorough analysis and forecast of open source ISA through RISC-V nice work 👍🏿

Great video. Thanks!

Well summarised. I have recently built a Ryzen 5 5600g based matx desktop PC. I fervently hope that Open Source, RISC-V succeeds. Then, if I ever build another PC, it will likely be based on RISC-V which looks to have great potential. Thank You.

@LackofFaithify

Жыл бұрын

Odds are good you won't be able to build a computer in the sense you are thinking of with risc-v anymore than you can just go out and buy an ARM cpu and then go buy a motherboard you like with it currently. It will be like the M1/M2/etc.. Macs. You will just be buying the system, not the parts and all the pros and cons that brings.

This all sounds pretty exiting to me, you go you good thing :)

Thank you Chris Excellent information , well presented Sir

Tons of great info Chris!!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Dave.

The adoption of RISC-V reminds me a lot of how the PIC microcontrollers basically wiped out the traditional CPU/RAM/EEPROM computer configurations in low cost applications. The ability for manufacturers to consolidate all those components (and PCB real estate) and save big money with a single-low cost chip is what completely changed that market. I don't think the question is whether RISC-V will change things, it's a question of what it will replace.

There is a huge hole in the market between the best desktop processors (M2 Ultra, i13900, 7950X) and servers. AMD used to fill it with ultra expensive Threadrippers. Intel used to sell the desktop Xeons, but both of those are gone now. I'd love to see RISCV fill that gap. 32 ultra fast cores with 4 or 8 DDR5 memory channels.

@paradoxmo

Жыл бұрын

It will be a long time before that may happen. RISC-V is likely to be used in the embedded market, then probably servers. These are applications that generally use new code or code that can be recompiled. Mobile and desktop are more dependent on pre-installed software, so these are more difficult to transition.

Thank you sir! As always you deliver highest quality content

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

So nice of you.

Thank you for your effort keeping tap on RISK-V tech

There is also one thing that happened that shows a lot good for RISC-V - MVidia failing to acquire ARM. This shown that private closed IP is inherent danger that your competitor will try to just buy it for themselves. No such risk with RISC-V.

Thanks for another update Chris - RISC-V seems to be forging ahead at a very quick pace!

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Greetings Chris. :)

Wait, mATX?! Ohhh, I am very intrigued! There are some console-looking mATX cases and older HTCP ones that would be an amazing enclosure for those. Absolutely intrigued in this!

Mark Twain said: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” Today chips are who rules the world? 😎 Thanks another great video.

Apple showed with M1 that faster and lower power chips are possible with ISA's of fixed length instructions. Intel and AMD should plan to transition to Risc-V and start to make x86 chips with Risc-V mode. Probably this will be the next and the last ISA transition after 32 bit and 64 bit x86 transitions. Intel could not manage to change inefficient x86 ISA to Itanium, but this time success is sure because transistor sizes are now small enough to put two ISA's into one chip.

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

I don't think Risc-V is fixed length, but check the documentation.

@Waccoon

Жыл бұрын

Almost all modern RISC designs use variable length instructions. ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, and SuperH have done it for a long time. The only thing that really differentiates RISC from CISC is whether you can access AND compute information in a single instruction. In almost all other respects, including addressing modes and SIMD, modern RISC processors do a lot of things the CISC way.

@mehmetdemir-lf2vm

Жыл бұрын

@@johndododoe1411 If you mean that Risc-V also have a 16-bit instruction mode like ARM Thumb, you are right. But the main problem with x86 is that instruction lengths vary greatly and instruction boundaries cannot be easily found and because of that converting instructions to microops cannot be done in a simple and efficient way. This limits number of translation units and prevents further speedup in x86 ISA.

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

@@mehmetdemir-lf2vm As far as I recall, RISC-V has a very regular instruction length pattern, but not fixed length like ARM 32-bit.

@mehmetdemir-lf2vm

Жыл бұрын

@@johndododoe1411 you recall right, but if you inspect the instruction set throughly most if not all the instructions are 32 bit, and 16 bit if compressed. longer instructions are also supported for future use to be flexible.

Very good review, it's make clear about the state of Risc-V in current date 👍

The fact that it's under open source licenses is a great plus for me. I'll keep my eye on this project, I hope it goes far

the RISC-V is actually quite entertaining and seeing it become more mainstream after a while is nice i have a feeling it may become able to also run x86 code as well on it and be more capable as a replacement desktop PC board while not being x86 powered

@LivingLinux

Жыл бұрын

Box64 is being ported to RISC-V by @ptitSeb123. He just posted a video playing SuperHexagon with Box64 on the VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC.

I'm always apprehensive when big tech embrace free and open source anything. You just know they are up to something.

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

RISC-V is an open (ie free-to-license) ISA. It is not open source (as in open source software).

Awesome stuff!

Very educational! Thank you, Professor...🇺🇸 😎👍☕

Great video!

Sunday (late evening) Morning RISCy EC!

to put it bluntly riscV looks hornier than Austin Powers at the all star invitational sorority house Christmas party - the overall global mkt is obviously hungry for it and the pace of development is accelerating - hopefully more players will jump into the riscV hot tub time machine and spur on more development and adoption - the cluster config looks particularly shagadelic if I do say so myself - good content! #self actualization #self awareness #agi building blocks

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

:)

@d.barnette2687

Жыл бұрын

Something tells me you are English. Just guessing. :)

@shephusted2714

Жыл бұрын

@@d.barnette2687 tom's hw has a recent article that goes into great depth on risc-V - well worth a look - youtube does not like links #balderdash #poppycock #joseph conrad #art conan doyle #alistar crowley #jim keller

You have made a very good overview and prediction.

@ExplainingComputers

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Stefan.

Exciting times! 👍

Eye-opening to say the least!

I would say RiscV will become a major platform eventually but that is probably around a decade away. Having said that if RiscV Socs can get to a point where they can leverage their licence free price advantage I foresee RiscV gaining traction quickly especially in the embedded space.

A good and thorough review as usual! I think Google wanting RISC-V as tier 1 android hardware is good news for the prospects of RISC-V based SoCs having decent GPUs embedded, though sadly I suspect they'll still be proprietary GPU cores for a long while yet. Personally, while I'm not sold on the RISC-V ISA itself as an 'ideal' platform, it is fantastic that the industry is moving towards a more open ecosystem and making some dent in the x86 & arm hegemony. x86 (even with 64bit extensions) is a horribly archaic ISA with far too much legacy holding back any progress potential, and ARM is just far too proprietary. To complement RISC-V in the move towards more open ecosystems, there are two shifts in the industry I'd love to see. An open GPU core akin to RISC-V, and RapidIO being adopted and replacing PCI-E as the dominant / standard interconnect. RapidIO is an open standard, and superior to PCI-E in many ways, but its adoption is still relegated to niche and specialized applications. I can dream. :D