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Comment by Uberphallus | Hacker News Reader

A friend works in ARM and was extremely surprised (negatively) when I shared this link with him

RISC-V may, perhaps, compete in two fields with ARM: education, where ARM doesn't give a fuck, and hacker boards, which is a tiny market compared to smartphones, smarttvs and so on. There have been around 15 million Raspberry Pi (the most popular SBC) sold in 6 years. Samsung sold 321 million smartphones last year alone.

Whoever is thinking today about replacing some production anything with a RISC-V is insane to begin with, but this campaign ups the insanity further.

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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/01/wdc_risc_v_edge_str...

https://www.wdc.com/about-wd/newsroom/press-room/2017-11-28-...

> Western Digital’s leadership role in the RISC-V initiative is significant in that it aims to accelerate the advancement of the technology and the surrounding ecosystem by transitioning its own consumption of processors – over one billion cores per year – to RISC-V.

Western Digital is moving to RISC-V. I'd say ARM has begun to notice the shift and needs to begin damage control.

There's an important third group, companies that want access to custom instructions they need and have the resources to modify a RISC-V design but don't want to spin a full custom design. I think both WD's and NVidia's use of RISC-V is in this category. It looks like NVidia was willing to spend for custom and WD's had been making due with larger ARM cores than they could get away with when they customized their processor - that's me reading between the lines as best I can - but WD's certainly been lost as an ARM customer and probably there'll be more in the future. Only a few companies, probably, but ones that are relatively big.

> RISC-V may, perhaps, compete in two fields with ARM: education, where ARM doesn't give a fuck, and hacker boards, which is a tiny market

Those seem like very similar markets to those that Linux started out with.

AFAIK, Sun never ran FUD/attack ads against Linux, but this feels similar to a hypothetical world where they did so very early in 1993.

I doubt FUD will ultimately be able to prevent the adoption of RISC-V, but it may be able to delay the inevitable for a few years.

If I recall correctly SCO did. At least they pointed out how much more stable they were than Linux.

And SCO was much more vulnerable to Linux than Sun was. Linux could even run SCO binaries unmodified.

And we know what happened to them later.

And I say this as someone who used to work for a SCO distributor, and later Sun.

>Whoever is thinking today about replacing some production anything with a RISC-V

You're saying they're all wrong?

https://riscv.org/membership/

well, there's a difference in supporting a technology and actually making chips with it. They are just investing in tech and research that might help them down the road.

I doubt any of those companies (aside from SiFive) will be actually using RiscV within the next few years.

Off the top of my head, Western Digital and NVIDIA have both announced using RISC-V in their upcoming products.

Besides the ones already noted, Qualcomm and others who make SoCs with custom CPU design (rather than using ARM Cortex) are paying ARM tax just to use the ISA.

I imagine RISC-V is attractive to them.

A lot of these SoCs become the core of smartphones. Did I mention Google (of Android fame) is also a member?

Sure, I'm just arguing that these should be seen more as strategic investments than as sign that these companies are about to roll out RISC-V chips right now, like GP implied.

WD and NVIDIA have stated outright that they're going to ship them at a volume soon.

That's extremely reductive and wrong.

Just because something is sold often does not magically make it better or useful for specific peruses. How does it help Nvidia that ARM sells millions of cheap when they design an internal chip?

The are lots of places RISC-V can be used productively, and companies like NVidia, Google and WD are already doing so.

In 1994, less than 0.1% of computers were running Linux (kernel). Now, it is everywhere.

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