[tsmi]

I agree mostly with Keller's take but I think he left of one key factor, the quality of the software tool chain.

The x86 tool chains are amazing. They're practically black magic in the kinds of optimizations they can do. Honestly, I think they're a lot of what is keeping Intel competitive in performance. ARM tool chains are also very good. I think they're a lot of the reason behind why ARM can beat RISCV in code space and performance on equivalent class hardware because honestly, like Keller says, they're not all that different for common case software. But frankly x86 and ARM toolchains should dominate RISCV when we just consider the amount of person-hours that have been devoted to these tools.

So for me the real question is, where are the resources that make RISCV toolchains competitive going to come from (and keep in mind x86 and ARM have open source toolchains too)? And, will these optimizations be made available to the public?

If we see significant investment in the toolchains from the likes of Google, Apple and nVidia, or even Intel. ARM needs to be really worried.

[ansible]

I don't know that such a heavy investment in the toolchains for RISC-V are actually needed.

If you look at generated code, it seems fairly straightforward. There aren't a lot of tricks or anything.

[tsmi]

It's not so much "tricks" that one needs to look out for.

The compiler has just tons of internal heuristics on when and when not to apply various code transformations. Those heuristics, first off may not even be applicable for your platform of choice, and even if they are, their magic numbers aren't necessarily tuned well to the platform and application at hand.

Here is a well written and concise case study, albeit somewhat old (2010), that illustrates what I am talking about. The results of variations measurements will have changed since then but the overall high level situation hasn't. If you read the paper, in your mind, just replace every instance of x86 with ARM and every instance of ARM with RISCV and you'll get the idea.

https://ctuning.org/dissemination/grow10-03.pdf

[BirAdam]

I think the serious investment will be from Intel, Apple (with LLVM), and possibly Microsoft (into the GCC/Linux ecosystem).