RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computing (RISC) principles. In contrast to most ISAs, the RISC-V ISA can be freely used for any purpose, permitting anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software. While not the first open ISA, it is significant because it is designed to be useful in modern computerized devices such as warehouse-scale cloud computers, high-end mobile phones and the smallest embedded systems. Such uses demand that the designers consider both performance and power efficiency. The instruction set also has a substantial body of supporting software, which fixes a usual weakness of new instruction sets. The project began in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, but many contributors are volunteers and industry workers outside the university. The RISC-V ISA has been designed with small, fast, and low-power real-world implementations in mind,[2][3] but without over-architecting for a particular microarchitecture style.[3][4][5][6] As of May 2017, version 2.2 of the userspace ISA is fixed and the privileged ISA is available as draft version 1.10.
>you will never, ever have a RISC-V phone with a linux-kernel based OS
Nicholas Sanders
No, that one uses Power9 processors which are vulnerable to Spectre
Nicholas Powell
they're patchable though. The only reason risc-v wasn't affected is because the platform is still too young to have had optimizations like speculative execution built into it yet. There are still hardly any actual physical risc-v chips floating around anyway, so it wouldn't have been much of a big deal even if they were affected.
Andrew Fisher
They got patched
Joshua Walker
Well at least we know they won't make the same mistakes now
Bentley Cooper
3D printing CPU's when?
Benjamin Walker
So, how powerful are these chips? Could you use one to make a DIY tablet or laptop?
Cooper Smith
Last I heard there are only RISC-V microcontrollers at this point
Jayden Robinson
bump
Camden Rodriguez
there is one chip that will be released around the start of the current year, along with a dev board, clocked around 1.45GHz that will be able to run linux sifive.com/products/risc-v-core-ip/u54-mc/
Nathan Clark
Any plans for laptops?
Ryder Jenkins
That's correct, which is why I linked dev kits and upcoming SOCs. The dev kits you can buy right now and the SOCs have yet to be released.
Isaac Hill
Olimex may or may not make a DIY kit when the SOCs get released like they have with their ARM DIY laptop kit.
Asher Walker
>this quarter >lowrisc
not even this year
James Nelson
...
Benjamin Nguyen
Whoops didn't see this and made a thread anyway. Since this exists I guess i'll ask here. When do you think servers could happen?
Leo Rogers
You guys know that an open-source ISA isn't going anywhere big right?
There are two options for RISC-V >mild adoption, eventually killed by differing standards established by different implementations >turned into a pseudo proprietary specification because companies start using it and create proprietary extensions or auxiliary features that become essential for contemporary implementations (think Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish but gatekeep instead of extinguish)
Mason Reyes
>turned into a pseudo proprietary specification because companies start using it and create proprietary extensions or auxiliary features that become essential for contemporary implementations (think Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish but gatekeep instead of extinguish) Yeah they really should have made it copyleft.
Chase Williams
It'll see at least some usage, given that Google, Qualcom and Nvidia are among the organization's top members. We'll probably get graphics cards with RISC-V; beyond that is anyone's guess.
James Edwards
is there any phone with RISC? how hard is to program on it with "mid"/high-level languages like C, Python, C++, etc.?
Mason Morris
If this was some tiny project made by one guy with virtually no attention, then I would have agreed with him, but this is something that has tons of people paying attention to it. I hope that leads to something bigger (laptop, desktop, server, etc)
Brandon Campbell
>is there any phone with RISC? Not yet. Whether there will be in the future or not is still up in the air.
>how hard is to program on it with "mid"/high-level languages The point of not using Assembly is that you can't tell what architecture you're programming for, unless you start doing some very close-to-the-metal execution stuff. So for the most part, you shouldn't notice unless you're writing compilers or codecs.
Leo Wood
A phone with "RISC" would be all of them (ARM is RISC). As for "RISC-V", there currently are none. The first implementations are going to be SBC-type things (think Raspberry Pi), and then hopefully it will make its way into other markets. Also, I think GCC is ported, so C and C++ should work well enough.
Carson Price
"Phone" didn't always mean portable. Just sayin'...
Caleb Rogers
But now it does.
Nathaniel Walker
cool
Brandon Walker
Keep an eye on lowRISC. That looks like the most promising one.
