[cjs_ac]

Is anyone making RISC-V SoCs outside of China?

Trade restrictions have given China serious incentives to make RISC-V CPUs domesticly, unlike every other country that can just buy AMD64 and ARM chips. Given the geopolitics of the situation, while RISC-V is gaining marketshare in the microcontroller space, it looks like RISC-V will be the Chinese-bloc CPU ISA while the west sticks with what we already have.

[sylware]

RISC-V is becoming a worldwide interop standard, and a real one, namely royalty free and which will be stable in time once we get all the "now we know" features, and all that at the ISA level (x86_64 and ARM are _NOT_ worldwide royalty free).

And don't be mistaken, there is no perfect ISA (it is said "average"), it does not exist, only a set of trade-offs and compromises which will not fit all use-cases perfectly.

RISC-V is a US Berkley initiative. Have a look at wikipedia where you'll find most of the answers to your questions.

That said, to be a success, RISC-V will need _extremely_ performant implementations all across the board ("embedded", desktop, server), micro-archs and silicium process. It will have to survive its mistakes: for instance critical bugs in its major micro-archs or design flaws (you have to presume it will happen).

And without access to the best silicium process, it _WON'T_ have performant implementations. Because there is no "enough" in the silicium industry, it wants always more transistors and less power consumption, and each new silicium process brings significant improvements on those metrics.

This is where chinese chip designers are in trouble: Taiwan has the foundries with the best silicium process, and now you get US restrictions on EU EUV tools.

Even though I wish intel and amd to switch to risc-v in the not to far away future, I would give attention at the people over there who would try to torpedo RISC-V. The other one, ARM, well, they will try everything to sabotage it, RISC-V is a death sentence for them... unless they clearly move to RISC-V ultra performant micro-arch design.

[hajile]

RISC-V is already putting the squeeze on ARM in the embedded market. RISC-V is fewer gates at almost every performance level the embedded market is interested in due to having a tighter, non-legacy ISA (there's even the open SERV core which fits RISC-V into an insanely small 2.1KGe).

RISC-V likely has a future in mobile devices as it crawls up the performance tree like ARM did. This leaves ARM in a tight squeeze between x86 on the top and RISC-V on the bottom.

[snvzz]

>(there's even the open SERV core which fits RISC-V into an insanely small 2.1KGe).

And QERV, only slightly bigger, yet dramatically faster.

[sylware]

I am waiting for this RISC-V Cortex 42... they better move there, and everybody will be happy.

[saxonww]

This is the first time I've ever seen anyone write 'silicium' and sure enough, it's an alternative name for silicon.

I wonder if this is a more common name for silicon in some other part of the world (I'm in the US). I don't think I've ever seen this spelling before today, and I'm not a young person.

[the_third_wave]

It is the spelling used in e.g. the Netherlands, a country where the light metal used in aircraft goes by the name Aluminium which also happens to be the correct version [1] of the bastardised Aluminum.

The word Silicon 'feels' wrong to a Dutch speaker because it makes it sound like integrated circuits are made out of the same stuff used to assemble aquariums, fake boobs and heat-resistant flexible cookware. That stuff is called 'siliconenrubber' or 'siliconen' (depending on the application and who you ask) in Dutch.

[1] a bit like vi vs emacs for chemistry in other words

[Dylan16807]

The original name was alumium.

And it sounds like you're saying aluminium got corrupted into aluminum, which is not the case.

[kube-system]

Silicone has silicon in it.

[adgjlsfhk1]

honestly, I'd be in favor of renaming to computium. then you get to teach kids that sand is computium-dioxide!

[the_third_wave]

That's it, now it finally becomes clear. Hear me.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not just a story, it is the story. The story of our planet, Earth, a planet-sized computer built by the Amaltheans to find the definitive question to life, the Universe and everything for which the answer is '42'. Things went awry when an ark full of telephone cleaners crashed on the planet/computer which made it come up with the wrong question. The book only mentions that they'd have to build a new Earth to run the program again but now it can finally be proven that they did no such thing - they just used the old one and recycled the top layer of the machine's substrate and left us the evidence: sand. Billions of tons of recycled computing equipment cover our beaches, filling up the bottom of the seas and covers parts of the planet.

Think about this the next time you're laying a brick wall, pour some concrete or are annoyed by the gritty stuff between your teeth when you eat your lunch on the beach. You're literally eating computing history and who knows what effects that will have on the final outcome.

[theanonymousone]

Yes. We knew it as silicium in the school and it took me some time to realise that silicon is the same thing.

For a long time I assumed that Silicon is the "unofficial", American word for it, while silicium is the scientific name.

[ThinkBeat]

Nvidea is now producing specific models of their products specced in a way that is currently legal to sell them to China.

The US doesn't like it, so they may change the rules again. which becomes a bit of a whackamole.

Sanctions like these gives China a lot more incentive for a reunification with Taiwan. Some say the fabs are rigged to blow if this was to occur. If so, it would have massive negative consequences for the world. Where as new management would have far less of an impact, though some countries might find themselves under sanctions on what type of chips they could buy.

[Dylan16807]

> The US doesn't like it, so they may change the rules again. which becomes a bit of a whackamole.

There were rumors like that, but I don't believe it.

The limits nvidia is following are very clear. They cover both total compute power and compute power per square millimeter, in different combinations. nvidia is doing exactly what they were supposed to do. No limits are being pushed, and there is no whack-a-mole on the horizon.

Even if the limits get reduced at some point, it would be because of political winds shifting, not because the current limits aren't doing what they were supposed to do.

[brainerazer]

'reunification'

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

Would not be the first time the cheaper technology becomes the market leader instead of the "better" one. Time will tell.

[jsheard]

I've seen a few companies adopting RISC-V for embedded applications outside of China, like the management processor on Nvidia GPUs or Western Digitals SSD controllers, but those are places you'd probably use a small Cortex-M core rather than a big Cortex-A SoC if you were using ARM. Nvidia is still all-in on ARM for big processors.

[adgjlsfhk1]

Western digital and Nvidia are both shipping riscv (just not as standalone processors)