On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Alexander McLin <alex.mc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, February 23, 2018 at 11:08:23 AM UTC-5, David K. Storrs wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Alexander McLin <alex....@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >>> As one of those who have been following RISC-V progress for several >>> years and also interested in seeing Racket being ported to that >>> architecture I want to drop a note to let you know you have my support! >>> >> >> As someone who doesn't know a lot about hardware, I'm curious: what >> effect would runningthe new architecture have? Would it enable new >> functionality, provide performance boosts...? >> > > In the near-future, none. > > RISC-V is designed to be an open-source ISA free of any royalties or > licensing concerns whatsoever. The idea is to provide a flexible family of > ISAs which can be combined as needed for one's purposes and any company or > foundry can manufacture RISC-V CPUs without restrictions. RSIC-V's long > term goal is to become a universal ISA anyone can use in contrast to X86 or > ARM which come with hefty licensing fees and restrictions on who can > manufacture chips which makes it difficult for anyone else to innovate in > those spaces. > > As for enabling new functionality, one major goal for RISC-V is to allow > the ISA to be extended in well-defined ways which preserve backward > compatibility but allow innovative features to be enabled for specific > applications. It remains to see how successful that would be. My > expectation is better support for hardware-based security features and > audit of hardware designs by independent parties which is significant given > how the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have highlighted the opaque > nature of the closed-source X86 hardware. > > Once anyone who's interested can at relatively low costs explore the > design space of possible RISC-V hardware, who knows what performance > benefits may become possible. > Cool. Thanks for explaining; it sounds like it could end up being the same sort of transformative thing that Linux has been. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
