- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
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Love this. I don’t know much about risc-v but I’d love to see it disrupt the market a bit.
RISC-V still has a ways to go before it usable for much.
Could someone eli5 risc-v and why the fuss?
Not an eli5 because I’m still not caught up on it but if my memory serves, RISC-V is an open source architecture for processors, basically like amd64 or arm64, actually I’m pretty sure ARM’s chips are RISC-V derivatives.
ARM and RISC-V are entirely different in that neither one is based on the other, but what they have in common is that they’re both RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) architectures. RISC is what makes ARM CPUs (in your phone, etc) so efficient and hopefully RISC-V will get there too.
x86 by comparison is Complex Instruction Set Computing, which allows for more performance in some cases, but isn’t as efficient.
So is Reduced Instruction Set like in the old assembly days where you couldn’t do multiplication, as there wasn’t a command for it, so you had to do multiple loops of addition?
The CISC vs RISC thing is dead. Also modern ARM ISAs aren’t even RISC anymore even if that’s what they started out as. People have no idea what’s going on with modern technology.
X86 can actually be quite low power (see LPE cores and Intel Atom). The producers of x86 don’t specialize in that though, unlike a lot of RISC-V and ARM producers. It’s not that it’s impossible, just that it isn’t typically done that way.
The original debate from the 80s that defined what RISC and CISC mean has already been settled and neither of those categories really apply anymore. Today all high performance CPUs are superscalar, use microcode, reorder instructions, have variable width instructions, vector instructions, etc. These are exactly the bits of complexity RISC was supposed to avoid in order to achieve higher clock speeds and therefore better performance. The microcode used in modern CPUs is very RISC like, and the instruction sets of ARM64/RISC-V and their extensions would have likely been called CISC in the 80s. All that to say the whole RISC vs CISC thing doesn’t really apply anymore and neither does it explain any differences between x86 and ARM. There are differences and they do matter, but by an large it’s not due to RISC vs CISC.
As for an example: if we compare the M1 and the 7840u (similar CPUs on a similar process node, one arm64 the other AMD64), the 7840u beats the M1 in performance per watt and outright performance. See https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7840u-vs-apple_m1. Though the M1 has substantially better battery life than any 7840u laptop, which very clearly has nothing to do with performance per watt but rather design elements adjacent to the CPU.
In conclusion the major benefit of ARM and RISC-V really has very little to do with the ISA itself, but their more open nature allows manufacturers to build products that AMD and Intel can’t or don’t. CISC-V would be just as exciting.
Thank you so much for this information.
If you still have commenting motivation, what are the top 5 differences between x86 and ARM?
Up until your post I had thought it exactly was the size of the instruction set with x86 having lots of very specific multi-step-in-a-single instruction as well as crufty instruction for backwards compatibility (like MPSADBW).
I’m more familiar with RISC-V than I am with ARM though it’s my understanding they’re quite similar.
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ARM/RISC-V are load-store architectures, meaning they divide instructions between loading/storing and doing computation. x86 on the other hand is a register-memory architecture, having instructions that do both computation as well as loading/storing.
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ARM/RISC-V also have weaker guarantees as to memory ordering allowing for less synchronization between cores, however RISC-V has an extension to enforce the same guarantees as x86 and Apple’s M-series CPU have a similar extension for ARM. If you want to emulate x86 applications on ARM/RISC-V these kinds of extensions are essential for performance.
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ARM/RISC-V instructions are variable width but only in a limited sense. They have “compressed instructions” - 2 bytes instead of 4 - to increase instruction density in order to compete with x86’s true variable width instructions. They’re fairly close in instruction density, though compressed instructions are annoying for compilers to handle due to instruction alignment. 4 byte instructions must be aligned to 4 bytes, so if you have 3 instructions A, B and C but only B has a compressed version then you can’t actually use it because there must be 4 bytes between instructions A and C.
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ARM/RISC-V also makes backwards compatibility entirely optional, Apple’s M-series don’t implement 32-bit mode for instance, whereas x86-64 still has “real mode” for running 16 bit operating systems.
There’s also a number of other differences, like the number of registers, page table formats, operating modes, etc, but those are the more fundamental ones I can think of.
Up until your post I had thought it exactly was the size of the instruction set with x86 having lots of very specific multi-step-in-a-single instruction as well as crufty instruction for backwards compatibility (like MPSADBW).
The MPSADBW thing likely comes from the hackaday article on why “x86 needs to die”. The kinda funny thing about that is MPSADBW is actually a really important instruction for (apparently) video decoding; ARM even has a similar instruction called SABD.
x86 does have a large number of instructions (even more so if you want to count the variants of each), but ARM does not have a small number of instructions and a lot of that instruction complexity stops at the decoder. There’s a whole lot more to a CPU than the decoder.
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The current CPU architecture we use for desktops/laptops are old, complex and a bit creaky. RISC-V is a modern, fast and efficient architecture, which is free and open. Expect hugely lower battery consumption and for the computer to just “feel” faster, even if the specs are equivelent to other CPUs. The fact that it’s free also make it easier and cheaper to work with. However, software support is going to be absolutely shockingly abysmal and probably will be for at least 5-10 years, until there’s some buy in from e.g. Microsoft or someone who can make a decent translation layer.
If you want to experience the benefits of RISC nowadays in a desktop or laptop pretty much the only option is Microsoft Surface or Apple Silicon macs, which are ARM64 - this isn’t RISC-V, but they are RISC - and many of the benefits apply to them. Apple’s software support is lightyears ahead of Microsoft though, so I’d strongly suggest avoiding the ARM64 surface, at least for the time being.
Now imagine we only had Windows and no one would create such thing because Windows and it’s programs does not have support.
Any information on the GPU they are pairing with it?
Does anyone know if it’s possible to use a regular AMD or Nvidia GPU with it?
This is not for someone to daily drive. You’ll probably get better performance duct taping and raspberry pi to Bluetooth keyboard and 7 inch pi display.
haha, that doesn’t answer the question at all. But I appreciate you.
It does actually.
The GPU inside the processor/soc has the following specifications:
- Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2
- Video Decoder – H.265, H.264 4K @ 60fps or 1080p @ 30fps, MJPEG
- Video Encoder – H.265/HEVC Encoder, 1080p @ 30fps
I don’t think you’ll be able to use a separate/external GPU with it. Thunderbolt support is highly unlikely and that processor has only 1 or 2 PCIe lanes (depending how USB is connected), which is likely already used for WiFi.
The processor it’s using is linked in the article: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/08/29/starfive-jh7110-risc-v-processor-specifications/
It’s a system-on-chip (SoC) design with an embedded GPU, the Imagination BXE-4-32, which appears to be designed mainly for smart TVs and set-top boxes.
The SoC itself only has two PCIe 2.0 lanes on separate interfaces so you can’t use both for the same device, and one is shared with the USB 3.0 interface.
That’s not even enough bandwidth to drive an entry-level notebook GPU from over a decade ago. Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.
The other commenter wasn’t kidding by saying you could get more power out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s even mentioned in the article.
Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.
Connecting a GPU with just one PCIe lane isn’t the biggest problem. You’ll just slow down data exchange between the CPU and GPU (mostly loading textures and vertex positions).
If your game mostly relies on shaders and renders lots of rather static stuff, you’ll mostly just get longer loading times but FPS shouldn’t suffer too much.
Given how much modern games stream data in and out of VRAM, I think it would actually be quite a significant issue. Although, for modern games the 520M would probably be below minimum requirements anyway. It was just to illustrate my point.
It would be obviously “an issue” and drastically reduce performance in many cases, but compared to the buildin igpu, you’d probably still be able to get a much better performance for lots of applications.
Managers at big companies: “No we will not buy any products that have ‘Risc’ in them…if someone gets hacked we’ll take all the blame!”
That makes sense. Management types are usually pretty RISC-averse
I have to admit you made me chuckle
I would say that IBM is a rather large company and I’m pretty sure they’ve been producing RISCs for like 30+ years.
As if managers even know what RISC-V is
They prefer RISC-0, and MONEY-5
I mean… I do, too…
This board also has soldered memory and uses MicroSD cards and eMMC for storage, both of which are limitations of the processor.
Ah, yeah, hard no from me dog. Can we get one of the new Snapdragons tho? Please?
That doesn’t bother me too much.
With the CPU being that slow, I don’t think you’ll really need a proper SSD. (And the CPU doesn’t have the required PCIe interfaces anyway).
They probably could’ve added socketed RAM, but based on the photo, the main board looks quite full and messy with random chips (likely needed to work around CPU limitations), so it probably wasn’t a high priority.
I’m interested in the cooling requirements and battery life.
I’m not interested in ARM CPUs with all their weird proprietary stuff.
The mainboard looks cluttered due to the verbose silkscreening, it doesn’t actually look that complex compared to the other mainboards.
Qualcomm and Broadcom are the two biggest reasons you don’t own your devices any more. That is the last option anyone that cares about ownership should care about. You should expect an orphaned kernel just like all their other mobile garbage. Qualcomm is like the Satan of hardware manufacturers. The world would be a much better place if Qualcomm and Broadcom were not in it at all.
What did they do ? I thought all processor are following standards hence I am running Linux on my Intel or AMD CPU.
Not the case with ARM processors sadly, IMO they’re a bit of a mess from that perspective. Proprietary blobs for hardware, unusual kernel hacks for some devices, and no device tree support so you can’t just boot any image on any device. I think Windows for ARM encouraged some standardization in that regard, but for the most part looking at Android devices it’s still very much the wild west.
This is one of the many reasons why Raspberry Pi ARM boards remain popular for the time being, despite there being so many other cheap alternatives available: they actually keep supporting their old boards & ensure hardware on their boards works from the get-go.
There are also some rare cases where Raspberry Pi rewrite open source implementations of Broadcom’s proprietary blob drivers, in one instance for the built in CSI (optional camera)
Wasn’t there a bounty out like 10 years ago for writing an open source alternative to the video drivers? I remember reading about that.
Essentially no processors follow a standard. There are some that have become a de facto standard and had both backwards compatibility and clones produced like x86. But it is certainly not an open standard, and many lawsuits have been filed to limit the ability of other companies to produce compatible replacement chips.
RISC-V is an attempt to make an open instruction set that any manufacturer can make a compatible chip for, and any software developer can code for.
All their hardware documentation is locked under NDA nothing is publicly available about the hardware at the hardware registers level.
For instance, the base Android system AOSP is designed to use Linux kernels that are prepackaged by Google. These kernels are well documented specifically for manufacturers to add their hardware support binary modules at the last possible moment in binary form. These modules are what makes the specific hardware work. No one can update the kernel on the device without the source code for these modules. As the software ecosystem evolves, the ancient orphaned kernel creates more and more problems. This is the only reason you must buy new devices constantly. If the hardware remained undocumented publicly while just the source code for modules present on the device was merged with the kernel, the device would be supported for decades. If the hardware was documented publicly, we would write our own driver modules and have a device that is supported for decades.
This system is about like selling you a car that can only use gas that was refined prior to your purchase of the vehicle. That would be the same level of hardware theft.
The primary reason governments won’t care or make effective laws against orphaned kernels is because the bleeding edge chip foundries are the primary driver of the present economy. This is the most expensive commercial endeavor in all of human history. It is largely funded by these devices and the depreciation scheme.
That is both sides of the coin, but it is done by stealing ownership from you. Individual autonomy is our most expensive resource. It can only be bought with blood and revolutions. This is the primary driver of the dystopian neofeudalism of the present world. It is the catalyst that fed the sharks that have privateered (legal piracy) healthcare, home ownership, work-life balance, and democracy. It is the spark of a new wave of authoritarianism.
Before the Google “free” internet (ownership over your digital person to exploit and manipulate), all x86 systems were fully documented publicly. The primary reason AMD exists is because we (the people) were so distrusting over these corporations stealing and manipulating that governments, militaries, and large corporations required second sourcing of chips before purchasing with public funds. We knew that products as a service - is a criminal extortion scam, way back then. AMD was the second source for Intel and produced the x86 chips under license. It was only after that when they recreated an instructions compatible alternative from scratch. There was a big legal case where Intel tried to claim copyright over their instruction set, but they lost. This created AMD. Since 2012, both Intel and AMD have proprietary code. This is primarily because the original 8086 patents expired. Most of the hardware could be produced anywhere after that. In practice There are only Intel, TSMC, and Samsung on bleeding edge fab nodes. Bleeding edge is all that matters. The price is extraordinary to bring one online. The tech it requires is only made once for a short while. The cutting edge devices are what pays for the enormous investment, but once the fab is paid for, the cost to continue running one is relatively low. The number of fab nodes is carefully decided to try and accommodate trailing edge node demand. No new trailing edge nodes are viable to reproduce. There is no store to buy fan node hardware. As soon as all of a node’s hardware is built by ASML, they start building the next node.
But if x86 has proprietary, why is it different than Qualcomm/Broadcom - no one asked. The proprietary parts are of some concern. There is an entire undocumented operating system running in the background of your hardware. That’s the most concerning. The primary thing that is proprietary is the microcode. This is basically the power cycling phase of the chip, like the order that things are given power, and the instruction set that is available. Like how there are not actual chips designed for most consumer hardware. The dies are classed by quality and functionality and sorted to create the various products we see. Your slower speed laptop chip might be the same as a desktop variant that didn’t perform at the required speed, power is connected differently, and it becomes a laptop chip.
When it comes to trending hardware, never fall for the Apple trap. They design nice stuff, but on the back end, Apple always uses junky hardware, and excellent in house software to make up the performance gap. They are a hype machine. The only architecture that Apple has used and hasn’t abandoned because it went defunct is x86. They used MOS in the beginning. The 6502 was absolute trash compared to the other available processors. It used a pipeline trick to hack twice the actual clock speed because they couldn’t fab competitive quality chips. They were just dirt cheap compared to the competition. Then it was Motorola. Then Power PC. All of these are now irrelevant. The British group that started Acorn sold the company right after RISC-V passed the major hurtle of getting past Berkeley’s ownership grasp. It is a slow moving train, like all hardware, but ARM’s days are numbered. RISC-V does the same fundamental thing without the royalty. There is a ton of hype because ARM is cheap and everyone is trying to grab the last treasure chests they can off the slow sinking ship. In 10 years it will be dead in all but old legacy device applications. RISC-V is not a guarantee of a less proprietary hardware future, but it is one of the primary cornerstones blocking end user ownership. They are enablers for thieves; the ones opening your front door to let the others inside. Even the beloved raspberry pie is a proprietary market manipulation and control scheme. It is not actually open source at the registers level and it is priced to prevent the scale viability of a truly open source and documented alternative. The chips are from a failed cable TV tuner box, and they are only made in a trailing edge fab when the fab has no other paid work. They are barely above cost and a tax write off, thus the “foundation” and dot org despite selling commercial products.
They make a bunch of the other chips that go into computer devices, and from what I understand it’s binary blob or nothing for a lot of it?
I work with SoC suppliers, including Qualcomm and can confirm; you need to sign an NDA to get a highly patched old orphaned kernel, often with drivers that are provided only as precompiled binaries, preventing you updating the kernel yourself.
If you want that source code, you need to also pay a lot of money yearly to be a Qualcomm partner and even then you still might not have access to the sources for all the binaries you use. Even when you do get the sources, don’t expect them to be updated for new kernel compatibility; you’ve gotta do that yourself.
Many other manufacturers do this as well, but few are as bad. The environment is getting better, but it seems to be a feature that many large manufacturers feel they can live without.
How’s this possible with the kernel under gpl? If you’re getting precompiled binaries, shouldn’t you also be able to get their sources by law?
I thought Mediatek was even more closed off than Qualcomm.
MIPS is Stanford’s alternative architecture to Berkeley’s RISC-I/RISC-II. I was somewhat concerned about their stuff in routers, especially when the primary bootloader used is proprietary.
The person that wrote the primary bootloader, is the same person writing most of the Mediatek kernel code in mainline. I forget where I put together their story, but I think they were some kind of prodigy type that reverse engineered and wrote an entire bootloader from scratch, implying a very deep understanding of the hardware. IIRC I may have seen that info years ago in the uboot forum. I think someone accused the mediatek bootloader of copying uboot. Again IIRC, their bootloader was being developed open source and there is some kind of partially available source still on a git somewhere. However, they wound up working for Mediatek and are now doing all the open source stuff. I found them on the OpenWRT and was a bit of an ass asking why they didn’t open source the bootloader code. After that, some of the more advanced users on OpenWRT explained to me how the bootloader is static, which I already kinda knew, I mean, I know it is on a flash memory chip on the SPI bus. This makes it much easier to monitor the starting state and what is really happening. These systems are very old 1990’s era designs, there is not a lot of room to do extra stuff unnoticed.
On the other hand, all cellular modems are completely undocumented, as are all WiFi modems since the early 2010’s, with the last open source WiFi modem being the Atheros chips.
There is no telling what is happening with cellular modems. I will say, the integrated nonremovable batteries have nothing to do with design or advancement. They are capable monitoring devices that cannot be turned off.
However, if we can monitor all registers in a fully documented SoC, we can fully monitor and control a peripheral bus in most instances.
Overall, I have little issue with Mediatek compared to Qualcomm. They are largely emulating the behavior of the bigger player, Broadcom.
This is a dev kit. This is not for normal people to use. RISC-V is not there yet, but this is a good first step.
arm first stood for acorn RISC machine
one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops
RISC-V
💀 i know. do i have to attach my brain to my comments?
Great, I’d be glad if they would consider shipping to more countries as well with localized keyboards
I mean, they at least offer a blank + clear ANSI and blank + clear ISO keyboard options along side their 14 other keyboard formats.
Yes that’s amazing — but a blank keyboard is not for everyone.
Moreover, even if I try to cope with this setup, I still cannot receive the laptop and I’d have to use a power adapter
It’s just usb-c power right?
Yes, and so what?
As surprising as it may seem, some might still want to use the supplied charger because they don’t have spare ones powerful enough for the laptop.
I have a Macbook with Magsafe and 6 USB-C phone / small devices chargers. None of them could power a Frame.work so I cannot just use another charger because it’s usb-c
Just buy one if you need. I don’t understand people who prefer forced bundles over deciding what to buy.
Unless you think an included charger is free. It’s not, it’s factored in the price.
