I can understand RISC-V's use in academic settings or if you truly want open hardware.
But what's the commercial benefit? Its an open core, its lacking patents because the performance critical aspects have been patented by others in their designs, so how does this stack up in terms of performance? Can you make a processor design as fast as proprietary ones like the Linux effort?
Second comes the issue of fabrication, is there somebody ready to fab this? Or are you just going to throw this on a large FPGA? If you're throwing it on a FPGA, then why take jabs at the other ISA's when you'll be running this on non-open proprietary sillicon anyways.
Lastly, who cares? I'm guessing embedded is out as they care out the cost of each chip, the cheaper and more performant the better. Perhaps you're running something mission critical or are totally tied to a architecture, but then you're a dinosaur, the industry's trending towards abstracting the hardware away anyways. Do you really care which piece of sillicon your app runs on?
All of the above's probably really biased, misguided and wrong, but I'd like to hear what other HN'ers have to say.
their F.A.Q. states that they expect performance not worse than ARM, which sounds like a dealbreaker (there wasn't anything similar in OpenCore movement like… ever!).
Fabrication: these guys do it http://www.lowrisc.org/ and don't forget about chinese production companies who use custom MIPS now — this is a great altarnative for them. Actually, this applies to any government which needs verifiable hardware non-tampered by NATO
I think Open ISAs such as SPARC, OpenRISC and RISCV and their related ecosystems and tools provide the following opportunities:
-Educational: Engaging more people in hardware design and creating a much bigger community who can understand and design complex systems without the need to start from scratch. Moreover, a larger community leads to the improvements and maturity quicker than propriety solutions.
-Commercial: I agree that they may not be able to compete with proprietary solutions in few applications in near future. However, in many applications the combination of open ISAs and proprietary solution enable faster customization and development time. A good example is NavSpark/Venus (http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/), a GNSS solution based on Leon3 with an attractive price and competitive features comparable to the state of the art.
But what's the commercial benefit? Its an open core, its lacking patents because the performance critical aspects have been patented by others in their designs, so how does this stack up in terms of performance? Can you make a processor design as fast as proprietary ones like the Linux effort?
Second comes the issue of fabrication, is there somebody ready to fab this? Or are you just going to throw this on a large FPGA? If you're throwing it on a FPGA, then why take jabs at the other ISA's when you'll be running this on non-open proprietary sillicon anyways.
Lastly, who cares? I'm guessing embedded is out as they care out the cost of each chip, the cheaper and more performant the better. Perhaps you're running something mission critical or are totally tied to a architecture, but then you're a dinosaur, the industry's trending towards abstracting the hardware away anyways. Do you really care which piece of sillicon your app runs on?
All of the above's probably really biased, misguided and wrong, but I'd like to hear what other HN'ers have to say.