Apple Exploring RISC-V Machine Architecture for Future Silicon

[Aquinus]

NV us all about greed.

nVidia, the way you're meant to get played.

 

[mtcn77]

I think in their macbooks they had issues with nvidia GPUs and solder, maybe due to heat and/or solder alloy?

I think Apple is too big already, but for some reason I think I would rather see ARM in their hands instead of Nvidia. Ideally on their own or some other non-conflict party.

All Apple enterprises involve practical investments. I can hardly remember any engineering faults on their part. They never aimed to cannibalise their past investments which have all held up well, all things considered.

 

[Upgrayedd]

Don't really understand all the defense for Apple. They're the same as everyone else, they want it as cheap as they can get it and want to sell it as high as they can. Looks to me like Apple might have to actually pay a premium on something for once.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Apple, for all their faults, really doesn’t care about the industry outside of their own work. Hardware and software decisions are made to benefit Apple in terms of sales to customers. I’d be surprised if they ever took their chip designs outside of the Apple environment. They are going to keep those designs to themselves and sell it for the highest value they can get, but only to Apple customers. If Apple owned Arm, I could see them largely leaving it alone, except to leverage the best IP it has to offer. Apple seems to view hardware as secondary to the software experience. The hardware should perform, but it needs to get out of the way. They don’t even talk much about hardware specs, just performance gains over previous generations.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I'm surprised apple didnt do this sooner. They bought IP and entire companies to control their own hardware, yet they kept paying ARM for eons when RISC-V was just sitting there, no fees.

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.

ARM Should be Bought by a joint UK/EU Venture (at least a major Shareholding).
That way it Remains independent of the Major Chip designer/fabs and "Outside of National Intrest "
Looking at you USA/China/Russia

The UK police state is hardly any wore then china/russia/usa. Being arrested for mean tweets anyone?

That's why I don't trust NV buying ARM, even big players like Apple doesn't trust it..

While they can have another reason for this move, Apple makes millions of chips of each design, so it's just normal they're exploring multiple options to see what suites them more.

If they can make RISC-V works for them better, they can move to it, release them selfs from any danger of ARM being acquired by a company like NV. And also get rid of the ARM license fees. It's normal for any company as big as Apple to explore multiple options, they even tested AMD CPU's multiple times since they moved to x86 with Athlon/Opteron.

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.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I'm surprised apple didnt do this sooner. They bought IP and entire companies to control their own hardware, yet they kept paying ARM for eons when RISC-V was just sitting there, no fees.

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.

I forgot all about Tegra. With all the artifacting issues that Tegra3 had in my ASUS Transformer tablet, I think I probably wanted to forget about it. The Tegra4 in the Surface 2 was a better performer, but that thing got super hot, and I don’t know who to blame for the lack of that device’s stability. It was a tablet I wanted to love, and I tried several versions before just giving up.

 

[Panther_Seraphin]

Anything that shows Crapple the bird is a good one. Thus, I support nGreedia. Let the problems fight themselves.
Come at me.
(It's really too bad that RISC-V isn't copyleft tho.)

Problem with that thinking is suddenly phones become a lot more expensive due to licensing as well

 

[Selaya]

Yeah.
Make phones cost $2,000. I don't care.
The entire phone ecosystem is shit & shittier.
Good riddance.

 

[Minus Infinity]

The author makes it sound like Nvidia's ARM acquisition is a done, which it is certainly not. Hopefully their are sensible people advising the relevant agencies this deal would be a disaster for the global chip industry and that it must not proceed in any way shape or form.

 

[Thorsthimble]

NV us all about greed.

I'm not going to defend Nvidia one bit here, because I agree with you. But so is Apple, right to the core. Pretty much any major company for that matter.

 

[eidairaman1]

nVidia, the way you're meant to get played.

Thats true for sure

I'm not going to defend Nvidia one bit here, because I agree with you. But so is Apple, right to the core. Pretty much any major company for that matter.

Yup known this about them Back in 95.

 

[pat-roner]

I'll bet they've got the expertise to design their own CPU. Regardless, they're so rich, that they can just buy that expertise if necessary.

They do; Johny Srouji was reported to be on the short list as Intel's new CEO, which of course he declined. And the CPU team over at Apple is running laps around the competition with ARM. They have some of the best talent in the biz, and I'm sure they would be able to do what they want.

 

[mtcn77]

And the CPU team over at Apple is running laps around the competition with ARM.

I kind of get enamoured over the idea. I don't like their design lead, but they certainly aren't wearing kid gloves with that Arm microarchitecture.

 

[pat-roner]

I kind of get enamoured over the idea. I don't like their design lead, but they certainly aren't wearing kid gloves with that Arm microarchitecture.

They are certainly doing great work. To "successfully" transition their platform to arm, and the gains they have made in the laptop space is just incredible. Of course there are lots of stuff to be solved still, but since it's Apple, software companies are bending over backwards to support it. Remember when Adobe said they would not support Arm with Windows RT (iirc that's what it's called), but when Apple went ARM, they announced it right away.

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.

 

[mtcn77]

Perhaps RISC-V is the future due to it's nature of open source.

Risc is actually pretty powerful. Execution resources are naturally scheduled. It is a huge benefit. Consider ARM can schedule automatically since every instruction is the same width, with RISCV they are also divisible at the hardware. Lots of opportunities at the scheduler which is what the frontend is boggled with all the time.
The defining moment in Haswell architecture was powergating instruction scheduler when the frontend decoders were running. X86 is at a convoluted standstill, imo.

 

[prtskg]

Nvidia buying Arm will lead to much more development of RISCV, so perhaps it's not that bad.

 

[qubit]

Risc is actually pretty powerful. Execution resources are naturally scheduled. It is a huge benefit. Consider ARM can schedule automatically since every instruction is the same width, with RISCV they are also divisible at the hardware. Lots of opportunities at the scheduler which is what the frontend is boggled with all the time.

Yup. that fixed instruction length is a massive benefit.

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.

 

[mtcn77]

Nvidia buying Arm will lead to much more development of RISCV, so perhaps it's not that bad.

It is actually a huge burden of opportunity for the industry. One that is most negligible, quite unlike lithography jumps which makes the situation immensely stupid since it is definitely avoidable - each pureplay developer won't be able to cover the migrational costs which makes the deal contradictory to the market trends.

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.

 

[skizzo]

oh yea I forgot about the whole rather salty breakup of Apple and Nvidia.....they basically clammed up any macOSX version beyond High Sierra 10.13.6 (or whatever ended up being the final release of 10.13.X). Their (Nvidia) "web drivers" were no longer supported on Mojave and newer macOSX versions. I could see why Apple might be a bit worried about how Nvidia could end up legally restricting Apple's business through their control of ARM.....seeing how Apple thought to control what GPU's could be used on their systems.......sounds like typical cut throat business tactics on both their ends.

 

[prtskg]

It is actually a huge burden of opportunity for the industry. One that is most negligible, quite unlike lithography jumps which makes the situation immensely stupid since it is definitely avoidable - each pureplay developer won't be able to cover the migrational costs which makes the deal contradictory to the market trends.

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.

I know it's avoidable and a huge burden. But some companies can go for it and some will go for it. For long term consideration, I don't think Nvidia buying Arm is that bad as some people say.

 

[mtcn77]

I know it's avoidable and a huge burden. But some companies can go for it and some will go for it. For long term consideration, I don't think Nvidia buying Arm is that bad as some people say.

I don't think you see the contradiction. Those that are in the crosshairs of this deal have already consented, those that are above rejected it. It is like the market has spoken, but have it your way.