Very cool to see a team of 25 students put this together and get prototypes made. I wish opportunities like these were available back in my college days.
The headline is getting slightly ahead of the actual performance. Reaching Cortex-A76 performance is their goal after many more iterations. Their current implementation is not there yet, but that shouldn't detract from the magnitude of their achievement and their contribution to the open-source world:
> This culminated with an 8-core prototype built based on Yanqihu (雁栖湖) architecture using TSMC’s 28nm process with the processor running up to 1.2 or 1.3 GHz that should be taped out this month. But plans have been made to tape out a new prototype based on Nanhu (南湖) by the end of the year, using SMIC’s 14nm process allowing up to 2 GHz frequency, and further iterations of the architecture will aim at rivaling Arm’s Cortex-A76 processor.
RISC-V is an exciting development in the SoC world. We're starting to see some of HiFive's boards trickle out into the wild. The performance is good, but it's not quite as groundbreaking as many of the headlines make it out to be. The most exciting part of all of this is that ARM has more competition and we get to see some open-source contributions like this.
Are there higher level abstraction efforts in the linux kernel to prevent a hypothetical custom RISC-V diversity explosion from ending up quite as messily as custom ARM did?
Afaict, most of the ARM ugliness was around non-"CPU" SoC components. But it definitely seemed like kernel code organization wasn't ready for a 10x (or 100x) explosion of popular SoCs.
And the entire point of open sourced RISC-V cores is that they would enable even more chip diversity, no?
> I wish opportunities like these were available back in my college days.
I'm forgetting the source, but some book I read discussed some period of silicon valley as a place where colleges quite routinely exposed students to chip-making. It sounded like the fabs of the area greatly supported these efforts. I'm not sure where I read it but it's stuck with me across many years, always strongly affirming my belief that people, when given exposure to how & means to do, begin many great things.
For someone unfamiliar with how the overall process works, what’s the road from this design to seeing this power laptops or desktops available to consumers? It isn’t clear to me, for example, what else needs to be designed around this - a motherboard? Will software “just works” since it is using a known instruction set architecture?
> Very cool to see a team of 25 students [in China] put this together
There will be many more stories about Chinese "Open Source" CPUs, because the USA has declared a strategy for this decade to control and limit the flow of advanced semiconductor tech to China. China would love to have bright minds from the West contribute to "Chinese Open Source" CPUs. Western contributors will find that these "Open Source" designs can only be economically fabricated in China, though, creating dependence on China.
It's worth noting that Micro Magic's design tools are likely what allowed them to claim these numbers. Some of the claims they make about their software are pretty impressive, but it mainly boils down to intelligent placing/routing techniques that mirror fully custom hand-made silicon designs but are actually designed by the computer: http://www.micromagic.com/datasheets/PDFs/DPC_3page_Layout.p...
It seems like their design workflow is ahead of the rest of the field.
I don't know whether it is possible with chip development or not. But I really hope that this project will enable numerous amount of derivative chips just as Linux kernel allows multiple distro. That means IoT/GPU/CPU/etc chips need not to start from scratch. In addition, having similar foundations might help fabs manufacture those chips swiftly.
> But I really hope that this project will enable numerous amount of derivative chips just as Linux kernel allows multiple distro. That means IoT/GPU/CPU/etc chips need not to start from scratch
It's not yet in computers, let's see if they dont face real world struggle in actual industrialization for the mass market first (or if they even manage to reach this point).
Productivity goes from design to client satisfaction :) A very productive team is not a team who prints an open source document nobody can use !
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
The headline is getting slightly ahead of the actual performance. Reaching Cortex-A76 performance is their goal after many more iterations. Their current implementation is not there yet, but that shouldn't detract from the magnitude of their achievement and their contribution to the open-source world:
> This culminated with an 8-core prototype built based on Yanqihu (雁栖湖) architecture using TSMC’s 28nm process with the processor running up to 1.2 or 1.3 GHz that should be taped out this month. But plans have been made to tape out a new prototype based on Nanhu (南湖) by the end of the year, using SMIC’s 14nm process allowing up to 2 GHz frequency, and further iterations of the architecture will aim at rivaling Arm’s Cortex-A76 processor.
RISC-V is an exciting development in the SoC world. We're starting to see some of HiFive's boards trickle out into the wild. The performance is good, but it's not quite as groundbreaking as many of the headlines make it out to be. The most exciting part of all of this is that ARM has more competition and we get to see some open-source contributions like this.
[+] [-] ethbr0|4 years ago|reply
Afaict, most of the ARM ugliness was around non-"CPU" SoC components. But it definitely seemed like kernel code organization wasn't ready for a 10x (or 100x) explosion of popular SoCs.
And the entire point of open sourced RISC-V cores is that they would enable even more chip diversity, no?
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
I'm forgetting the source, but some book I read discussed some period of silicon valley as a place where colleges quite routinely exposed students to chip-making. It sounded like the fabs of the area greatly supported these efforts. I'm not sure where I read it but it's stuck with me across many years, always strongly affirming my belief that people, when given exposure to how & means to do, begin many great things.
[+] [-] andrekandre|4 years ago|reply
雁栖湖 → yangqi lake 南湖 → south lake
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fjgjfdkghjf|4 years ago|reply
There will be many more stories about Chinese "Open Source" CPUs, because the USA has declared a strategy for this decade to control and limit the flow of advanced semiconductor tech to China. China would love to have bright minds from the West contribute to "Chinese Open Source" CPUs. Western contributors will find that these "Open Source" designs can only be economically fabricated in China, though, creating dependence on China.
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
They are getting perf-per-watt numbers that are ahead of everyone...albeit with a single core and no real 3rd party verification.
Some of the group had worked on Sparc at Sun, and they had previously sold themselves to Juniper for $260M, then regrouped some time afterwards.
[+] [-] mnurzia|4 years ago|reply
It seems like their design workflow is ahead of the rest of the field.
[+] [-] MobiusHorizons|4 years ago|reply
Obviously I would love those perf-per-watt numbers to be correct, but it doesn't seem like they have shown it yet.
[+] [-] eunos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately most of the licenses used are not reciprocal and this does not encourage building ecosystems.
[+] [-] zokier|4 years ago|reply
I feel this has been already happening with ARM.
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps also a testament to what you get in terms of productivity, if you use a more modern platform / language (Chisel/Scala).
[+] [-] xwolfi|4 years ago|reply
Productivity goes from design to client satisfaction :) A very productive team is not a team who prints an open source document nobody can use !
[+] [-] goodpoint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|4 years ago|reply
Which apparently grants a patent license.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jhvkjhk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clubdorothe|4 years ago|reply
It's a great small hike you should do if you visit the city. Start the hike around 4.30pm to catch the sunset. https://taiwangoldcard.com/images/taiwan-unsplash.jpeg
[+] [-] jbluepolarbear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gswdh|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]