Thoughts?
[1] https://www.sifive.com/blog/risc-v-is-inevitable
I am not sure it's inevitable at all. That said, it sure looks like ARM did, minus the license fees. RISC-V can enter niche markets where price / performance is necessary on the low end of price and or power.
Things are still early though. Extensions are one ambiguity. How many will crop up and what will using them look like? Does one take over the ISA essentially?
Math performance, due to no flags and multiple instructions needed where single ones or even just a few less will matter too. Not saying the devices won't perform. They will, just at the cost of code size impacting effective cache size.
And no device is really performing today.
You don't have to take my word for it -- download the disk images for Fedora or Ubuntu for arm64, amd64, and riscv64 and run the "size" command on your selection of binaries.
riscv64 is consistently the smallest, and arm64 the largest.
The problem is that there are really no current commodity embedded RISC-V architecture parts - Chinese dime-a-dozen pseudo-Cortex ripoffs don’t count - remotely comparable in performance/power to better current alternatives.
Benchmarks of SiFive’s high end are laughable, being grossly sub-RaspberryPi which is hardly ARM top of the line (and doesn’t claim to be such). As SiFive’s P550 hasn’t materialized beyond PR, one can hardly consider it real.
Unless some stealth startup appears with a real Zen/NeoVerse analog, I expect this triumph of hype over reality to continue.
As is usual in the industry, any serious potential customer will have been able to get the full RTL for the core back in June or July, and evaluate its performance in simulators such as Verilator, or on FPGAs.
Claiming it's somehow not "real" is just stupid. There is no serious possibility that a core that boots Linux and runs SPEC etc in an FPGA won't work the same in a properly designed and manufactured SoC.
Benchmarks of the HiFive Unmatched are exactly what they should be given its A55-like microarchitecture -- a bit better than a Pi 3 and sometimes close to a Pi 4 on normal compiled C code. It doesn't have SIMD or specialised AES and SHA instructions, so of course benchmarks of that kind of thing are worse than a Pi. If that's important to you then of course don't buy one.
RISC-V International last month ratified a number of important extensions including Vector and crypto and those will start appearing in future chips.
There are several documented startups working on "M1 class" RISC-V cores, staffed with highly experience highly credible people such as Jim Keller or people who founded PA Semi and then developed ARM cores at Apple (including the M1).
There's no magic involved in making a top end RISC-V core, just money and good engineering.
