Alibaba's research arm promises server-class RISC-V processor due this year

schizoidman@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 101 points – Alibaba’s research arm teases server-class RISC-V processor
theregister.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13412490

Alibaba's research arm promises server-class RISC-V processor due this year

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That's an admirable goal, and I applaud the immense effort undertaken to make the OSS dream true.

The ISA may be open but I'm pretty sure the microarchitecture will be totally proprietary. Even with a kick ass microarchitecture they may still struggle if they can't use the latest process nodes to actually manufacture the chips.

Having said that I suspect the main challenge RISCV is going to face is the software ecosystem. That stuff can take a decade to build and requires a degrees of cooperation between all the companies building chips.

I don't think they're doing this for oss reasons

I don't think they're even required to publish the design, they could keep it proprietary

They're not. They're doing it because they fear being SOL if America/the West enforces more sanctions on things like ARM chips/designs or Intel, etc.

And yes, IIRC RISC-V is MIT licensed or something close. Basically companies can take it and implement whatever on top and not have to contribute back.

Alibaba's research arm

server-class RISC-V processor

Is this on purpose?

ARM is a type of RISCV, it makes sense their ARM division expands to other RISCV architectures.

EDIT: ARM is a type of RISC, not RISCV

No it's not. Arm is a RISC architecture. RISC-V also is a RISC architecture.

Arm is explicitly not RISC-V.

With all the liberty to do some research before commenting, I'm rather disappointed to see such factually wrong comment.

Arm in this context doesn't mean ARM.

I can see where this came from. ARM and RISC-V are both reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architechtures but are not the same. Arm is a proprietary ISA originally from Acorn. Risc-v is a new ISA developed completely open-source

EDIT: also, not to be killjoy, but for clarity "research arm" means apendage or division and is completely unrelated

I disagree. The simplest and best reading is they have an ARM CPU for research, and the CPU produced the RISC-V design.

Maybe we're reading something different, or this is tongue and cheek but "Alibaba's research arm, the Damo Academy, " sounds like research arm is a synonym for "research division" or "research department".

Nope, definitely a CPU. It's the CPU that's promising the server-class RISC-V processor.

Where in that article do you read that?

The part where it says "arm."

You're really not getting the sarcasm here are you...

No, I was hoping it'd be confirmed when I mentiomed it could be tongue in cheek. Doesn't always come across in a thread where some are unironically making the same point.

I was trying to criticize the original poster by using increasingly ridiculous arguments, when it was obvious they never actually read the article and even misread the post. Something something satire.

I guess it didn't come off obvious enough. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm just bad at reading sarcasm sometimes. Probably you were obvious and it went over my head

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computer

RiscV has been used for small specific tasks but running a whole OS on it still seems far fetched with so many libraries being unsupported. (yes it exists already but that is also very limited in functionality)