Timothy Pearson wrote:
The fabulous thing about RISC-V is what makes ARM successful; there can and will be multiple different silicon vendors, offering products with many different features and tradeoffs.
Some can be top performance but proprietary. Some can be transparent/open but slower.
We already have this (think cheap ARM SoCs vs. a Xeon).
Which one of ARM and Xeon do you consider transparent/open?
And which one to the degree possible with a RISC-V core?
I'm honestly surprised at the overall community betting on a long shot (RISC-V) vs. using what's available and open right now (POWER9); could anyone shed some light on these decision making processes?
Are POWER9 systems available off the shelf right now? That's the availability metric for a decision making process.
Until systems are in stock, everything is pure speculation. Preorder is really an edge case. Sorry. :\ But the good news is, I don't think anyone is mentally excluding having *more* open options - quite the opposite!
POWER and RISC-V may indeed have comparable openness, which I doubt, but if so then RISC-V certainly has the better PR/marketing.
An open ISA and core design does not guarantee open silicon
I already commented on that, no need to repeat.
ron minnich wrote:
The open ISA can go both ways
Only an open ISA can go both ways *simultaneously* - I think that many are excited about the possibility that RISC-V may, rightly so.
RISCV vendors can create SMM.
And one vendor can choose not to. And there is a market for both.
But just claiming that "riscv is open so there won't be anything proprietary" is being a bit unrealistic in my view.
For the third time (this is now getting very annoying) - noone has claimed that.
Timothy Pearson wrote:
It really comes down to getting people to look at POWER as something other than the power-hungry beast POWER8 was, and that's proving somewhat challenging.
There is no significant POWER visibility. I know one single name at one single company immediately involved with an actual potentially orderable POWER product. (You!)
I have never seen a running POWER8/9 system. I've seen two running RISC-V systems and have ordered a third.
I am able to implement (a weak variant of) RISC-V on <100ยค hardware. Today. Actually, already over a year ago!
So; POWER8/9 either do not really exist in a relevant way at the moment, or they are just not reaching me, even though I have an interest in open hardware.
I can't tell which is more accurate. And maybe there's yet another option?
//Peter