Yes. We were here earlier. Second War of Architecture.
It is hard to overestimate how it gets. To review: Patterson invented RISC in 1980 and went to fight the recognized ISA. He won. Thirty years later, his students discover RISC for a modern era, and he and they go to fight the company whose success was provided by the Heritage of RISC: ARM.
In response to the Patterson newspaper, ARM fires with overthrow, “a matter for licensed instructions.” They say that nobody wants some accidental, unverified, unsupported ISA. Customers want success, standards, a proven “ecosystem”. Resources that would need to process and reprogram everything for the modern ISA? There is not enough cash in the world.
The RISC-V community does not agree. They create their own ecosystem under the auspices of RISC-V International and begin to adapt RISC-V to the needs of contemporary computers. Some supporters begin to call it the movement of “open source equipment”, even if hardcore RISC -ers do not love this expression. Equipment, embedded in a literal stone, cannot be “open source”, and besides, RISC-V does not count completely as equipment. It’s hardware software interfaceRemember. But semantics. The point stands: everyone, in any bedroom, garage or office in any part of the world, can operate RISC-V for free to build their own computers from scratch to set their own technological purpose.
The arm is right about one thing: it requires money. Millions, if not billions of dollars. (If you think that “Fabless” chip printers can do it for five characters, return to me in five years.) Still, RISC-V begins to win. Like the arm, in the 90s and 2000, he was successful in low-class markets, as in 2010 or RISC-V: special gadgets, computer systems in cars, such things. Why pay for Intel chips or ARM licenses if you don’t have to?
And guys from Berkeley? In 2015, they run their own company, called SifiveTo build computer parts based on RISC-V. Meaning: a arm is now not only a spiritual enemy. This is a direct competitor.
By time I went to this “very technical conference” in Santa Clara, the war with ARM-VS.-Risc-V was raging for almost a decade. I still felt it everywhere. We wonI have heard several times. Nobody is cheerful on the shoulderSomeone claimed. (One many years higher in ARM, which insisted on anonymity to discuss internal affairs, he questioned “nobody”, but admitted that in recent years there was a “change of culture.” “Ant is an asshole,” told me the former director of Sifive. In fact, only one person at the conference seemed to have something nice to say about the competition. He worked at the demonstration stand, and when I was surprised that his product It was built on the RISC-V processor, he became a bit green and whispered: “Actually this shoulder. Don’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell anyone.”
Booth Bro probably worried too much. In the world of equipment, everyone worked or has friends everywhere else. Calista Redmond, the star of the series, spent 12 years at IBM (and recently gave up RISC-V International to work in Nvidia). Even Patterson has connections with all places, Intelem-where, though less direct threat to the arm, is still a competitor of RISC-V. It was Intel Grant Money, Patterson gladly admits that it paid Berkeley architects to invent RISC-V. Without a closed source, reserved huge technology, there is no open source, for free for all technologies. Do not listen to techno hippies who claim differently; It has always been like that.