Monday, September 6th 2021
Apple Exploring RISC-V Machine Architecture for Future Silicon
Having only recently transitioned its Mac ecosystem to the Arm machine architecture, away from x86-64, Apple is finding itself in a position where it must prepare for an eventuality where NVIDIA withholds cutting-edge development of the Arm IP to itself. The democratized nature of the current Arm IP enables licensees like Apple to stay on the cutting-edge; since its holding company SoftBank does not make chips of its own. Apple is turning its attention to open-source machine architectures such as RISC-V, and reported started foundational work on the architecture that could eventually result in its own high-performance SoCs powering the iPhone, other iOS devices, wearables, and future generations of the Mac.
Source:
HotHardware
45 Comments on Apple Exploring RISC-V Machine Architecture for Future Silicon
I think it'd be great, mainly because I'd love to see the industry move to open source hardware. Literally anyone can make a RISC-V chip, but someone had to do the hard work of developing instruction sets and getting developers on board. If apple does this I'd expect at least most of the mobile industry to jump to RISC-V. The UK police state is hardly any wore then china/russia/usa. Being arrested for mean tweets anyone? I mean nobody should trust Nvidia. Or AMD or intel for that matter, but Nvidia has been caught doing grimy things many times, they left apple high and dry with their bad solder issues int he mid to late oughts, they screwed MS on the original xbox and cut off supply in 2005, screwed Sony on the PS3 GPU design only to release the 8000 series before the PS3 could launch with it's 7000 series fixed pipeline design, dropped the ball on tegra, continuously flip off the open source community, lied about the GTX 970's specs, try to lock down OCing, have successfully locked down voltage control, demand exclusivity from their higher tier partners (see also XFX's arse annihilation by nvidia), ece.
After nvidia dropped the ball hard with tegra, anyone who believes their claim of "improving" ARM's competitiveness or performance in any way clearly shouldnt be allowed to leave the house without an escort. The entire point of buying ARM is to grab patents and strong-arm companies into squeezing their coffers into Nvidia's greedy mouth. So many companies looking into RISC-V before the deal is even approved shows how little anyone trusts nvidia.
Make phones cost $2,000. I don't care.
The entire phone ecosystem is shit & shittier.
Good riddance.
My sister needed a laptop, so I bought her a entry level Macbook Air with a M1 chip, and while setting it up - of course i had to play around with it. So I installed World of Warcraft on it (since they announced day1 support of the M1 chip), and It ran at native (2560x1600) resolution with decent settings (slider at 6 if you are familiar with wow) and it ran a steady 60 fps (which is cap for some reason), and rarely dropped under. I played for maybe an hour, and in that time the mac never got hot, zero noise because zero fans ofc, and battery decreased with 10% ish.
Just that experience was enough for me to realize that those low power arm chips are the future of "thin lights" laptops. I hate my 15" MBP work laptop now, and I can't wait until they release a 15" with a M1/2/x that I can get on day 1.
I really hope the Nvidia aquisition will be blocked, but who knows who is there next. Perhaps RISC-V is the future due to it's nature of open source.
The defining moment in Haswell architecture was powergating instruction scheduler when the frontend decoders were running. X86 is at a convoluted standstill, imo.
It also means that when reverse engineering object code, you see all the instructions, with no ambiguity. Obviously data is also gonna look like instructions too, but it's not hard to tell them apart from the program flow and to tag it as data.
PS: not every manufacturer is a trendsetter like Apple. Letting Nvidia monopolize the trendfollowers will leave the market in a de facto monopoly between the big namebrands.