Startup formed by former Intel engineers and backed by AMD legendary chip designer wants to become the Arm of RISC-V
This is it, 15 years after RISC-V debuted, a startup launched by four Intel Alumni wants to take it to the next level and replace their former employee
I for one can't wait to be running a RISC-V system
No thanks, we don't need another middle man. RISC V doesn't need people paying licensing fees for it
It's an extremely shitty metaphor. But the ISA is the only open part. There already are and will be designs that will be licensed.
The beauty is, let them build highly performant risc-v cores to license. Everyone will win. As long as they don't shove poison pill proprietary bits in it. If they do then no one should license or design around them. Because it will just create bugs and incompatibility. But if they want to be the go to designer based on the quality of their designs and not proprietary lock in. Let's go.
As others have stated: https://riscv.org/about/
Now, there would still be a metric fuck ton of money involved. Chip fabs aren't cheap, engineers aren't cheap and project management isn't cheap.
The open architecture means there is already a framework and R&D costs will also be limited. And yeah, no licensing fees like we already covered.
Without diving deep into RISC V, just because there is an open architecture doesn't mean that there are machines capable of manufacturing whatever specs are required. Licensing fees for machining could be pure insanity.
Still, a few million (or billion?) is normal when it comes to making this stuff.
Would that be a risk? Isn't the whole point of RISC V that its ISA is open and free to use? That's not the case for ARM or Intel's x86 architecture.
What does it mean, the "Arm" of RISC-V ?
Is there an open source version of Arm?
I think they mean that ARM became dominant by widely licencing its RISC architecture to pretty much anyone. This startup wants to make RISC V designs and licence them to various chip manufacturers - so they won't be in the business of making chips themselves, just the design.
But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.
But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.
Not necessarily, RISC-V is permissibly licensed, so they could add proprietary extensions, that would make the binaries or even compilers only work with their implementation of the RISC-V ISA.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics would work on RISC-V, and I trust billionaires and huge corporations to enshittify it.
Big player joins RISC-V, creates design, introduces proprietary extensions, builds compilers that use them, software depend on them, other RISC-V designers need to license them, because the whole platform now depends on them.
Also based on how complicate it is to port Linux to different SoCs, which at least share a common ISA, it will be much more difficult if you need to support even more RISC-V ISAs with different proprietary extensions, not only in the kernel, but in the toolchain as well.
