
Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V site after own staff revolt - rch
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/
======
sverige
I have been a big fan of the RISC-V efforts. Arm's attack is actually
heartening in the sense that it confirms the perceived threat from RISC-V is
real. This is a moment on the path that makes me realize real progress is
being made for RISC-V.

The development of new technology seems to go so slow while it's happening;
it's only in hindsight that it seems it's always and inevitably been this way.
Still a long way from running OpenBSD on a 17" laptop with nothing but open
source hardware inside, but it's a nice moment.

~~~
lnsru
Sadly it is still very long way to open source laptop. Remember, processor or
SoC contains not only RISC-V core, but also many peripherals. Some peripherals
are easy to design (like UARTs and I2Cs), but gpu, pcie, ddr memory and
networking aren’t. The question is who will deliver these as open source
implementations. IMHO these are not attractive problems to solve in academia,
because they are already available as commercial closed source products and
lacks novelty.

~~~
phire
I think a bigger issue is patents.

Designing a decent CPUs without violating any patents is easy. Almost all CPUs
today follow design patterns which were established back in the mid 80s and
early 90s. All those original patents have now expired and you can sidestep
around the newer ones.

Things like GPUs have evolved massively since the late 90s, gaining support
for pixel shaders, vertex shaders, moving to unified core designs, gpu compute
and establishing new threading models.

And all these things have bled back into the Graphics standards. It would be
really hard to design a gpu implementing even a 10 year old standard like
OpenGL ES 2.0 without violating any patents.

And it will be even worse with things like pci-e, ddr and networking
controllers. You can't design around the patents without breaking
compatibility because there are standards enforcing you to follow the patents.

~~~
mjevans
An extremely basic (but power efficient) framebuffer would probably be enough.
At least with that and some less encumbered output stack (maybe display port?)
real and secure foundations could be made for truly verifiable voting
assistance systems. It should produce a voter readable paper ballot that is
the /actual/ poll and include a 'quick count estimate' for the next morning
reports.

~~~
lkcl
[https://github.com/RoaLogic/vga_lcd](https://github.com/RoaLogic/vga_lcd)

richard herveille created one 16 years ago which can do the job. it's silicon-
proven: ICubeCorp put it into their IC3128.

------
DannyB2
I remember when Microsoft seemed unassailable.

I remember Get The Facts.

I remember the arguments that "free" software must not be any good. That
nobody stood behind it. That is was only free if your time was worth nothing.
And on and on.

Now Microsoft's best days are behind it. Microsoft is openly embracing Linux.
Who would have ever believed SQL Server would run on Linux. Or that Microsoft
would create a Linux personality on Windows called "Windows Subsystem for
Linux". Microsoft even admitted (sorry I don't have a link) that the reason
for this embrace was to bring developers back.

Linux is now in everything that is not a desktop PC. From wristwatches to
mainframes and everything in between.

To the point: This now seems to be happening with open source RISC hardware.

~~~
3pt14159
What I don't get is why didn't Microsoft open source at least some of their
toolset even if they didn't make it free? I remember coding in the 90s. It was
a nightmare. You were never sure if you hit a bug in the programming language,
the operating system, or the database. All three were closed off. It was
maddening.

~~~
FussyZeus
Pretty much anything from the days of yore that was done stupidly by Microsoft
can be laid at Ballmer's feet, either directly, or in-directly via the company
culture he fostered.

He was the reason they missed out on open source, missed out on mobile, and
missed out on a ton of other stuff as he counted his money while the market
slipped ahead without them.

They're better now but I don't think they'll ever be the player they were in
the 2000's (and that's probably a good thing for everyone).

~~~
logfromblammo
"[Stomping] Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"

He wasn't entirely wrong, but even so, Nadella is a bazillion percent better
as the CEO. ...Actually, make that a gazillion percent better.

------
CalChris
When RISC-V was first coming out, the Berkeley folks published a position
paper:

    
    
      Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V
      https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.html
    

ARM published a response:

    
    
      The Case for Licensed Instruction Sets
      http://www.linleygroup.com/mpr/article.php?id=11268
    

Unfortunately that argument is behind a pay wall. Perhaps it should have been
titled _The Licensed Case for Licensed Instruction Sets_.

~~~
thrillgore
"To hear why ARM is great, you need to pay a fee first."

I can't help but laugh at how ARM is responding to RISC-V. They're giving the
architecture great publicity. Has Softbank forgotten how to run its
subsidiaries?

~~~
writepub
To be fair, the decision makers, i.e. asic architects,designers from top cop
firms, most likely aren't having out at HN, it banking on public opinion here.
ARM can bloody well do as it pleases with little impact on business

Where RISC-V does have a chance is in getting adopted by a company with a long
term Outlook and huge shipments. Ideal customer is Samsung, who use arm in
everything from DRAM/NAND to smartphones. If they can prove it commercially on
one product line, maybe SD cards, they can shake it to others over there next
decade.

------
waterhouse
Heh heh. I paused partway through the article to look at web.archive.org to
see exactly what ARM's website had said, and was going to post it here, and
then I checked and saw that the article links to the archived version too.
Props to the Internet Archive and to Chris Williams.

For reference: [http://web.archive.org/web/20180710130206/https://riscv-
basi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180710130206/https://riscv-basics.com/)

~~~
antpls
No one proved ARM was actually behind this. It could be a scam.

~~~
Yetanfou
[https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-
infogr...](https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-
infographic.png)

Enough proof all by itself unless they claim _arm.com_ has been 'hacked' or
abused through an insider job.

------
_nalply
It's too late. I call Streisand effect. At least I didn't know about RISC-V.
Yesterday I binged on the specification. Thank you Arm for enlightening me.

------
koosnel
If ARM didn't attack RISC-V I would not even know about them. Going to read
about them now.

~~~
jf-
Same here. Looks like an interesting project, but looks like it’s predecessors
sadly came to nothing.

~~~
nickik
That's somewhat of a strange argument. The predecessors were highly successful
and influential academic projects. The simply never had the idea/motivation to
try to move that stuff into the real world.

All of this stuff also now profits from the change/slowdown in Moors law.

~~~
jf-
Came to nothing in market terms, if you prefer.

~~~
nickik
That was never the goal or intention. Those were research products that did
exactly what they were designed to do.

It has absolutely no relevance for RISC-V being successful or not.

------
ggm
ARM holdings, is one of those stories which somebody in history of science,
economics, telecommunications should write up. Amazing outcomes. I feel sad
that industry went to an IPR model which says 'nobody except geniuses works in
the UK, we send this to fab lines elsewhere' but as a model, it totally
worked.

~~~
TorKlingberg
The physical fabs are a separate for good reasons. ARM's problem is that the
capture such a small portion of the value. Companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm,
AMD and Apple are also fabless, but they get a big chunk of the profits.

~~~
makomk
This also seems like it'd be RISC-V's problem too. ARM is, from what I
understand, pretty cost-competitive - they're not a big fat high-profit
behemoth ripe for disruption like say Intel. As it stands, I think the only
companies that can save money with RISC-V are the ones with enough volume,
staff, and specialised needs to take their chip design entirely inhouse
without using the services of companies like SiFive and who also don't need
compatibility with the existing software ecosystem.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
This just reeks of backtracking on behalf of Arm's management imho.

"Blame us, our hardworking staff (who are just like you) are not to blame."

It's a half-decent marketing strategy but it's not fooling me.

~~~
pertymcpert
You think the CPU designers were involved in this? Fool.

~~~
dang
If you continue to post uncivil comments to HN, we're going to have to ban
you. Would you please re-read the rules and use this site as intended?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
bencollier49
Wow, I was very critical of the UK government's decision to allow the sale of
ARM, but perhaps the time was right.

------
justinjlynn
Good. That site was typical tone deaf marketing rubbish.

------
jdblair
The first casualty of RISC-V will not be ARM, it will be MIPS. MIPS CPUs are
the current choice for low-cost embedded systems that run a Linux kernel, from
home routers (where MIPS has nearly 100% penetration) to low-end set-top-
boxes. I expect MIPS will be dropping their licensing costs even more to
compete at RISC-V matures and becomes a better option.

~~~
TomVDB
> ... from home routers (where MIPS has nearly 100% penetration) to low-end
> set-top-boxes.

I don't think that's true anymore for new installations. A lot of those home
routers and set-top boxes are using Broadcom chips, and they switched from
MIPS to ARM years ago.

~~~
jdblair
Broadcom still ships new MIPS SOCs, like the BCM7231. Context: I work on set
top boxes at Netflix.

------
thelastidiot
History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. Microsoft used similar tactics to
derail its OSS competition. Look what happened.

------
urmish
[https://www.arm-basics.com](https://www.arm-basics.com) was created in
response.

------
Annatar
The mnemonics of RISC V are terribly thought out when compared to OpenSPARC or
the legendary MC68000. Particullarly galling is the choice of dst, src rather
than src, dst (although that could be solved by using UNIX®️ version of
as(1)). Terribly thought out design internally. Not that ARM is much better,
mind you.

~~~
kps
If Intel has taught us anything about ISAs, it's that having a shitty one
doesn't much hurt.

If ARM has taught us anything about ISAs, it's that _starting_ with a nice one
doesn't mean it won't end up a mess. (There exist 32-bit ARM implementations
with precisely zero opcodes in common.)

------
thrillgore
ARM did an incredible job in that puff piece legitimizing RISC-V.

------
M_Bakhtiari
They should have just copied
[http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.1.28.153048.268.html](http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2002.1.28.153048.268.html)
and replaced 'Intel' with 'ARM' and 'AMD' with 'RISC-V'.

------
detaro
non-AMP link
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/)

~~~
poozer2
I don't know much about AMP, so could you tell me why or when a non-AMP page
is preferable. I read the wiki on it, but it didn't clarify my question. Thank
you.

~~~
toomanybeersies
AMP doesn't render properly for us not on our phones.

~~~
ars
It worked fine here, on Firefox desktop.

~~~
gcb0
good for you, running javascript everywhere.

With adblocker, or uMatrix, or noScript, etc, you have to white-list each
site. Trivial but annoying.

~~~
a1369209993
Why would you whitelist a rag^Wnews site like theregister.co.uk?

~~~
Symbiote
For a news site, it has a fairly low number of trackers, and it's in the EU so
GDPR applies.

------
antpls
To me, it looks like that site was not created by ARM, no one was able to
prove ARM created it, and it could be just a scam to attack ARM's public
image. That's bad journalism right there.

~~~
philpem
Fair point... except ARM were kind enough to leave the main infographic on
their own website as of two minutes ago.

[https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-
infogr...](https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/company/arm-risc-v-
infographic.png)

Probably fair to assume it's sanctioned by ARM if it's on arm.com. Unless they
play the "we were hacked" card.

~~~
waterhouse
Good find. Also, the article does say it talked to at least one person at ARM.
It would require that either Chris Williams made stuff up and wasn't caught by
anyone else at The Register (he is Editor-In-Chief, but I hope someone still
checks his work), or the ARM spokesperson and anyone else Williams talked to
was lying.

"Arm told us it had hoped its anti-RISC-V site would kickstart a discussion
around architectures, rather than come off as a smear attack. In any case, on
Tuesday, it took the site offline by killing its DNS.

“Our intention in creating a webpage to offer key considerations around
commercial RISC-V based products was to inform a lively industry debate," an
Arm spokesperson told The Register."

~~~
antpls
Honestly, for someone who doesn't know TheRegister, even that article looks
like a scam to me.

The linked image stored on the ARM server from the comment above is a way
stronger proof imho.

Edit : The picture could have still been hijacked from its initial purpose by
a malicious actor. Maybe ARM didn't planned to use that picture the same way
it was presented on the RISC related domain.

~~~
vertex-four
This is the tech equivalent of “CNN is making things up wholesale” - The
Register is a well-known, mostly reliable source of news. It might
occasionally get things wrong/have biases/etc but they’re not about to start
making up sources.

~~~
antpls
Well, I don't trust CNN either so it's actually a good comparison.

It seems "well-known" sources of news are using their comfortable position to
accept a lower quality of their journalism.

I'm not saying their are bad intended, but they took the choice of posting
often (with possibly unverified information) rather than posting rigorously
checked facts, and cross checked with different sources. I feel like I have to
do myself their work of cross verifying everything they post...

~~~
vertex-four
CNN doesn’t make up sources. The Register doesn’t either. The Register has a
source at ARM who states that the website was theirs. What, exactly, are you
suggesting happened?

~~~
antpls
I don't suggest anything, I'm only saying we trust way too much CNN and
journalists in general who reinforce our initial believes.

~~~
vertex-four
That statement could be made about _literally any_ article linked from Hacker
News, in addition to anything on the rest of the internet - why did you decide
to make it on this one?

~~~
antpls
Because I also commented on the HN thread about the offending website 24h
earlier TheRegister's article made its way to the public.

Already on the previous thread, someone suggested to be careful about that
website, as it couldn't be proved ARM did it.

