Where are people getting the "decade" number from? Looks demand for RISC-V just went up significantly and it's not like it's broken or not-existing, RISC-V "just worked" a year ago already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19118642
The "decade" comes from the fact that there is currently no RISC-V silicon with performance anywhere near the current ARM Cortex A series.
And a realistic estimate how long it will take to develop something that would be on par with today's Snapdragon, Exynos or Apple's chips is at least those 10 years. You need quite a bit more to have a high performance processor than just the instruction set.
The "just worked" chips are microcontrollers, something you may want to put in your toaster or fridge but not a SoC at the level of e.g. Snapdragon 835 (which is an old design, at that).
Also the Sipeed chips are mostly just unoptimized reference designs, they have a fairly poor performance.
Most people who talk and hype RISC-V don't realize this.
Alibaba recently said their XT910 was slightly faster than the A73. Since the first actual A73 launched in Q4 2016, that would imply they are at most 4 years behind.
SiFive's U8 design from last year claimed to have the same performance as A72 with 50% greater performance per watt and using half the die area. Consider how popular the Raspberry PI is with it's A72 cores. With those RISCV cores, they could drastically increase the cache size and even potentially add more PCIe lanes within the same die size and power limits.
Finding out new things takes much more time than re-implementing what is known to already work. As with other things, the 80/20 rule applies. ARM has caught up a few orders of magnitude in the past decade. RISCV can easily do the same and give the lack of royalties. Meanwhile, the collaboration helps to share costs and discoveries which might mean progress will be even faster.
janoc|5 years ago
And a realistic estimate how long it will take to develop something that would be on par with today's Snapdragon, Exynos or Apple's chips is at least those 10 years. You need quite a bit more to have a high performance processor than just the instruction set.
The "just worked" chips are microcontrollers, something you may want to put in your toaster or fridge but not a SoC at the level of e.g. Snapdragon 835 (which is an old design, at that).
Also the Sipeed chips are mostly just unoptimized reference designs, they have a fairly poor performance.
Most people who talk and hype RISC-V don't realize this.
hajile|5 years ago
Alibaba recently said their XT910 was slightly faster than the A73. Since the first actual A73 launched in Q4 2016, that would imply they are at most 4 years behind.
SiFive's U8 design from last year claimed to have the same performance as A72 with 50% greater performance per watt and using half the die area. Consider how popular the Raspberry PI is with it's A72 cores. With those RISCV cores, they could drastically increase the cache size and even potentially add more PCIe lanes within the same die size and power limits.
Finding out new things takes much more time than re-implementing what is known to already work. As with other things, the 80/20 rule applies. ARM has caught up a few orders of magnitude in the past decade. RISCV can easily do the same and give the lack of royalties. Meanwhile, the collaboration helps to share costs and discoveries which might mean progress will be even faster.
andoriyu|5 years ago
I'm not saying Apple can drop-in RISC-V front-end to their silicon and call it a day, but you get the idea.
Sifive has a pretty decent chance at making performant chips within next few years.