Timothy Pearson wrote: > > The fabulous thing about RISC-V is what makes ARM successful; there > > can and will be multiple different silicon vendors, offering products > > with many different features and tradeoffs. > > > > Some can be top performance but proprietary. > > Some can be transparent/open but slower. > > We already have this (think cheap ARM SoCs vs. a Xeon).
Which one of ARM and Xeon do you consider transparent/open? And which one to the degree possible with a RISC-V core? > I'm honestly surprised at the overall community betting on a long shot > (RISC-V) vs. using what's available and open right now (POWER9); could > anyone shed some light on these decision making processes? Are POWER9 systems available off the shelf right now? That's the availability metric for a decision making process. Until systems are in stock, everything is pure speculation. Preorder is really an edge case. Sorry. :\ But the good news is, I don't think anyone is mentally excluding having *more* open options - quite the opposite! POWER and RISC-V may indeed have comparable openness, which I doubt, but if so then RISC-V certainly has the better PR/marketing. > An open ISA and core design does not guarantee open silicon I already commented on that, no need to repeat. ron minnich wrote: > The open ISA can go both ways Only an open ISA can go both ways *simultaneously* - I think that many are excited about the possibility that RISC-V may, rightly so. > RISCV vendors can create SMM. And one vendor can choose not to. And there is a market for both. > But just claiming that "riscv is open so there won't be > anything proprietary" is being a bit unrealistic in my view. For the third time (this is now getting very annoying) - noone has claimed that. Timothy Pearson wrote: > It really comes down to getting people to look at POWER as something > other than the power-hungry beast POWER8 was, and that's proving > somewhat challenging. There is no significant POWER visibility. I know one single name at one single company immediately involved with an actual potentially orderable POWER product. (You!) I have never seen a running POWER8/9 system. I've seen two running RISC-V systems and have ordered a third. I am able to implement (a weak variant of) RISC-V on <100ยค hardware. Today. Actually, already over a year ago! So; POWER8/9 either do not really exist in a relevant way at the moment, or they are just not reaching me, even though I have an interest in open hardware. I can't tell which is more accurate. And maybe there's yet another option? //Peter -- coreboot mailing list: [email protected] https://mail.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
