Risc-V

[dos2unix]

Years ago.. back in the stone age... we had other computer CPU companies. It wasn't just AMD and Intel.
I've owned computer with Cyrix, Texas Instruments and VIA cpu's in them over the years.
Early Macs had Motorola 680x0 CPUs in them. Mac's also used the IBM PowerPC Risc CPUs for a while.

I've always liked RISC (Reduced Instruction set) cpu's. The IBM PowerPC RISC cpu currently holds the world
record for most intensive compute models.

30 years later... RISC returns? It remains to be seen... how RISC it really is.
I owned a Raspberry Pi for a few years, I recently sold it. Today I bought a VisionFive RISC-V system.
I haven't received it yet, so I can't say a lot about it. It does come with Fedora, so that's a plus.

So then... with all the cpu companies that have already failed... why do we need another one?
Because this one has an open source ISA (instruction set architecture) as opposed to the closed
ISA's that Intel and AMD use.

As much as I hope for more CPU competition, I do wish more of it was domestic. ( US based ).
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.

 

[dyfet]

ARM is a risc architecture, too, so risc never went away. A lot of current risc development is now on packing, decoding, and executing multiple "compatible" bit-packed instructions in a single 32 or 64 bit memory word and one instruction cycle, something risc-v was designed around from the start, while other older risc architectures came to later adapt. A compatible set of instructions that might be bit packed together could be something like load a from register x, inc a, store a to register y. The division between risc and cisc may then seem much smaller, especially at the compiler level, when we talk about "pseudo" cisc instructions which really are just a bit-packed group of risc ones that can execute together.

 

[SlowCoder]

As much as I hope for more CPU competition, I do wish more of it was domestic. ( US based ).
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.

Yes, it would be nice to have more domestic design and manufacture, I'd settle for western countries that don't have questionable labor laws and have appropriate pay.

 

[DeuilEtoiles]

Yes, it would be nice to have more domestic design and manufacture, I'd settle for western countries that don't have questionable labor laws and have appropriate pay.

Well said.
I'd question the enthusiasm shown in the video for the open source ISA. That's great and I'm sure we all appreciate it. As far as it goes. Instruction sets without hardware don't really mean a lot though.