Non-x86 Platforms Thread: for all your ARM, RISC-V, SPARC, and PDP-11 needs

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Non-x86 Platforms Thread: for all your ARM, RISC-V, SPARC, and PDP-11 needs

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

legooolas posted:

inline assembly in which looked like C function calls (I forget what the exact nomenclature was)

Are you thinking of compiler intrinsics?

# ¿ Oct 5, 2022 05:58

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 10:42

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

feedmegin posted:

You would be surprised. Auto-vectorisation is pretty hit and miss.

Yeah, all the simd-enabled math libraries I know of use either intrinsics or inline asm

# ¿ Oct 5, 2022 18:10

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

BobHoward posted:

SiFive's website is up and their corp twitter account has posted in the last few days, they seem to have a pulse.

I think you expected way too much if you thought SiFive alone was going to make RISC-V a huge thing in under a decade (or maybe ever). It's a company led by the same academics broadly responsible for the flawed (imo) RISC-V ISA spec. I have no doubt they can do real things, and possibly even good things, but competing head to head with relative giant Arm Holdings was and is a tall order.

I'm not just hot taking on the known deficiencies of the ISA and the tendency of academics to underestimate how difficult it is to ship things in the commercial world. It's just very hard to attack a successful incumbent in this space. Hardened Arm IP cores are available on every process node anyone wants to use, they're all debugged to hell and back, Arm's suite of non-CPU IP is extensive (which helps people bolt together SoCs fast), design technical support is excellent, and the software ecosystem is far more diverse and mature. If you're a SoC design house looking at which to use for an upcoming project, the extra cost of going with Arm buys you a lot less engineering risk, more options, and demonstrably better cores. Only thing RISC-V has going for it is price. Sometimes that's enough to win, sometimes it's not...

What are the problems with the ISA

# ¿ Jul 10, 2023 19:14

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

tbf it has worked out alright with LLVM, and with Linux, so I don't think it's insane to think an open ISA could work too. it really does seem like there's efficiency gain when companies collaborate on common infrastructure that supports the thing they actually want to sell

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 19:25

Yaoi Gagarin: Feb 20, 2014

Kibner posted:

That ACM article was a fantastic read. Thanks!

Check out his older one he links at the end, "There is no such thing as a general purpose processor". That's really good too

# ¿ Feb 23, 2024 17:33

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Non-x86 Platforms Thread: for all your ARM, RISC-V, SPARC, and PDP-11 needs