Re: Computer architects leaving Intel...

In article <2024Aug29.135124@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

Concerning the demand, RISC-V has the advantage of no ARM tax (and
legal costs like those between ARM and Qualcomm over the
developments started at NUVIA)

True, although the market for high-performance application cores is less
price-sensitive than the market for low-performance embedded ones.

Another RISC-V advantage is that the government of the USA puts
restrictions on ARM that should not apply to the free RISC-V
architecture.
 
It would apply to implementations designed in the USA (such as those
by Ahead), but the point is that on the ISA level, and thus the
buy-in into the ecosystem (e.g., from ISVs), RISC-V has an advantage.

As someone who does porting and platforms for an ISV, I'm seeing no
customer demand whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that's because of the lack of
high-performance implementations. I'd like to do RISC-V, because new
architectures are fun, but I can't get hardware at present that's up to
the job, and so I can't justify spending time on it.

RISC-V also has a technical advantage over ARM: It has Ztso (total
store order) as an optional extension, which helps porting of
multi-threaded software from AMD64 (and emulation of AMD64
software). No such thing on ARMv8 or ARMv9 yet, although
implementations like the Apple M1 and Fujitsu A64FX provide
this feature.

Yup, that's an advantage. I have not had trouble with the lack of it on
multi-threaded ARM Linux or ARM Windows, but the threading framework I
use was originally developed on SPARC and does its mutexes properly.

But it's also possible they just want to carry on being chip
architects while being in charge of their own company.

Sure.  But what are the investors seeing in the company?

Hard to say, given the things venture capitalists are prepared to throw
money at these days.

Even if an architecture has a long track record, like MIPS, that's
not enough, as the switch from the MIPS ISA to RISC-V shows.

In my market sector, so far, that's "the death of MIPS." That happened in
2008, simply because it wasn't remotely performance-competitive.

What I read is that the Snapdragon X implements ARM v8.7.

You're right, I mis-remembered.

John