this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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The important thing about RISC-V is that it's a completely open CPU architecture that could be competitive with ARM. It's arguably the best chance we have at performant computing hardware that doesn't spy on us or become useless after just a few years. We need this.
Blocking its development would be a big win for certain corporations, and a loss to basically everyone else. The AutoTL;DR bot didn't capture that side of the issue, but a quote in the article does allude to it:
I don't understand what you mean. Why does ARM hardware become obsolete after a few years? Lacking ongoing software support and no mainline Linux?
What does that have to do with the instruction set license? If you think RISC-V implementors who actually make the damn chips won't ship locked hardware that only run signed and encrypted binary blobs, you are in for a disappointing ride.
Major adopters, like WD and Nvidia didn't pick RISC-V over arm for our freedoms. They were testing the waters to see if they could stop paying the ARM tax. All the other stuff will stay the same.
Correct. (And firmware support.)
Barrier to entry (cost) and license restrictions (non-disclosure) are generally problematic for anyone wanting to ship open hardware.
I don't think anyone expects existing ARM device makers to change their behavior with RISC-V. Rather, RISC-V opens the door to new players who do things differently.
Seeing the runaway succes of others like Nvidia, Apple, Mediatek, do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?
Being a good citizen with regards to transparency in firmware and Linux support is not a proven differentiator for these vendors and shown time and time again not to be a requirement for success.
I see steadily increasing interest in privacy, data security, repairability, and e-waste reduction. The markets for these things may be relatively small today, but they are growing, and open hardware can address all of them.
Curious choice of words. I suppose it depends on how we define "meaningful". There are measures of success other than becoming a trillion-dollar market capitalization tech giant. There are many businesses that succeed despite being different, in some cases because they are different.
More concretely, we have already been seeing new entries for several years. (Purism and Raptor Computing Systems, for example.) They have thus far been limited in what they can offer, partly due to the lack of truly open and affordable components, and partly because the demand for products like theirs is just getting started. But both of those hindrances are changing.
I think how much this area will develop and grow depends on how we either support it or impede it with obstacles. I hope attempts at short-term defence against a rival won't lead us to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Not only that, taking action against open source for "national security" is definitely a road we should not go on! It's not that far away from Microsoft claiming Linux is going to give China an unfair advantage.