Intel, SiFive Demo High-Performance RISC-V on Intel 4

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7277/intel-sifive-demo-high-performance-risc-v-horse-creek-dev-platform-on-intel-4-process/

by ac29 • 4 years ago

152 145 4 years ago

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wyldfire• 4 years ago

Score one for freedom. And that's certainly worth something. But how well does it perform when stacked up against less free architectures?

pabs3• 4 years ago

The RISC-V implementations are unlikely to be libre, certainly the parts provided by the Intel 4 process node are not libre.

panick21_5• 4 years ago

Having commercial developments on RISC-V helps the whole ecosystem and makes it possible to eventually have open cores that can run the standard software.

So its kind of like Linux could eventually run much of the software developed for unix and took most of that market.

Currently its simply not possible that an open core can actually compete against x86 or ARM.

Fabs being open will take longer.

mhh__3• 4 years ago

Score nothing for freedom, has absolutely no bearing at all on our freedom as users.

booi• 4 years ago

I hope they’re careful with that engineering sample because it’s probably the only one they were able to make

hajile5• 4 years ago

Intel's 10nm mistake was trying too many new things at one time. Now that they've fixed that, they've not only fixed 10nm, but also fixed problems other fabs had pushed off until later, so catching up will take a lot less time.

dev_tty01• 4 years ago

No, it was the opposite. Getting stuck at 10nm was actually due to being unwilling to do new things. They refused to transition to extreme UV lithography. Gelsinger himself has admitted this in interviews.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

I had no idea intel was actually fabbing anything on the intel 4 process at this time.

simfree• 4 years ago

The size of this chip at 4 square millimeters is pretty small, it probably makes for a good test chip before trying to tape out chonkier chips that would have a much higher fault rate.

wmf• 4 years ago

They also have Meteor Lake in testing.

atty2• 4 years ago

From investor calls (where they actually can’t lie, at least not without fines and losing their jobs), they’ve had test samples of meteor lake for awhile already, which uses Intel 4. They’ve even had successful power-on samples for their 20A node (maybe also 18A?). It sounds like Intel is finally making some advancements on their process roadmap. Of course we’ll have to wait and see if they can hit acceptable yields, or if 4 becomes the next Intel 7 debacle. (Hopefully not)

etempleton2• 4 years ago

I think Intel’s current leadership is slowing righting the ship, it just takes time in this space. It seems like Intel is making the right moves for 5-10 years from now instead of trying to maximize short term returns.

rektide• 4 years ago

Meh. Good for Intel. Frankly it's souring to me to see a fresh core with the same usual suspects providing the usual IP blocks though. Cores are easy. But all the un-core is ridiculously propeietary & ultra far from libre here, and in a lot of RISC-V.

ngcc_hk• 4 years ago

Is it freedom or is it buying the totalitarian counties way to slave the world? Any competition is good. Until it kill your very Systerms.

hajile5• 4 years ago

China already makes x86 and ARM knockoffs. x86 up through SSE2 (and maybe SSE3) is already patent-free too.

getcrunk• 4 years ago

After apple silicon was released, I was wondering if intel and amd would respond with some arm socs down the line due to the seeming "end of road" for x86. But now what if they are intending to hold out on x86 long enough (~5-7 years) to be able to go all in on riscV?

vosper• 4 years ago

Is x86 at the end of the road? I don’t follow closely, but I impression is it’s been getting faster and faster ever since AMD stepped up and provided some competition with Ryzen.

ahartmetz• 4 years ago

Almost like AMD is saving Intel from itself...

In any case, if Intel needs to diversify, open source (RISC-V) does seem better than proprietary mortal enemy (ARM).

atty2• 4 years ago

Both AMD and Intel have released some truly impressive CPUs lately, and this month both of them are releasing their next-gen products (ryzen 7000 and raptor lake respectively, I believe). The new ryzen chips are looking very impressive, and if Intel’s announced numbers are to be believed, raptor lake is going to be pretty great.

Where they fall down is on perf/watt, not raw performance. However there’s a lot of things that go into that difference, not just ISA, so I’m not sure if anyone has really decided if x86 is fundamentally less efficient, or just currently less efficient due to current design choices and constraints.

jabl5• 4 years ago

Is x86 at the end of the road?

No. AMD and Intel are the oligopolistic providers for an unbelievably vast software ecosystem that practically rules all computing outside embedded (and some legacy mainframes here and there), are they going to throw away that market position just because the cleaner encoding of ARM or RISC-V would save an estimated low single-digit % of decoding power [1]?

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool...

mhh__3• 4 years ago

No. It's not a nice ISA but in the 20 Billion transistor limit it's not the pressing issue

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

An ARM based design would make sense, except unlike Apple they'd have to buy a license. Apple has a perpetual license so they don't have to pay a thing and can do what they want with it. Like the M1 processor. But Intel does not have that. So, developing risc v in the background without committing to it, yet, makes a lot of sense. It might actually give them a path to come up with an answer to the M1 that isn't just a slightly more efficient x86 processor.

Apple just demonstrated that changing CPU architecture is not that big of a deal; so the value of x86 compatibility isn't what it used to be. You can just emulate it and it's fine. Even for games apparently. So Intel, backing an architecture that is already starting to compete with arm that is free makes a lot of sense.

AMD has the same challenge. And despite Nvidia failing to buy ARM, it's pretty clear that their long term strategy is not going to be letting other companies supply CPUs but to provide a complete solution.

scrlk• 4 years ago

At one point, Intel stated that they retained their ARM architectural licence even after they sold their XScale line to Marvell.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-we-have-arm-license-no-p...

ZiiS• 4 years ago

Intel used to make a whole line of StrongArm chips. Even today they ship Arm softcores with thier FPGAs. They have no issue with Arm's licensing.

cma• 4 years ago

You can just emulate it and it's fine.

Not quite.. Apple also had to modify ARM on the hardware side to support x64's stronger memory ordering. But RISC-V has options for both I think.

For an attempt at doing it without modifying the hardware see Microsoft's slow emulation attempt on their ARM version that was rejected by consumers and increased battery consumption much more.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Apple just demonstrated that changing CPU architecture is not that big of a deal;

That's if you have monopoly like control over your entire eco-system...

dmitriid3• 4 years ago

An ARM based design would make sense, except unlike Apple they'd have to buy a license.

License is the least of it.

Apple released their first custom chip in 2013. And spent several years before that designing it.

So, it took Apple up to 15 years to get to where they are now with M1.

Even if AMD and Intel start now, and are twice as fast at developing new CPUs, they will need 6-7 years to reach parity with 2022 Apple in... 2028

jabl5• 4 years ago

Apple has a perpetual license so they don't have to pay a thing and can do what they want with it.

"Everybody" knows that Apple has an ARM architectural license, but AFAIU the terms haven't been disclosed. Presumably they got a sweeter deal than other ARM architectural licensees when they got rid of their ownership in ARM ages ago, but, "don't have to pay a thing" and "can do whatever they want" sounds a bit too sweet to be true?

So, developing risc v in the background without committing to it, yet, makes a lot of sense.

TBH, I think Intel's interest in RISC-V is more about hurting ARM in the embedded market than about planning to sunset x86.

hnaccount_rng• 4 years ago

I think the recognition of “Apple showed that it’s not a big deal” would end similar to the one “The US showed that military invasions from superpowers into middle powers are not a big deal”.

The amount of raw effort that Apple put into making that transition _appear_ “no big deal” will be hard to adequately appreciate! It _noticeably_ affected software quality at least two MacOS versions prior (drop of 32-bit support and forcing all API accesses to go via their frameworks) and will have cost them hundreds of millions if not billions in engineering effort and unknowable amounts of lost sales in the mean time.

Yes it paid off. Obviously. But emulating their move, I’m not sure if there is even a single company able to do that.

allie12• 4 years ago

I am a M1 Max user and I would love to have Apple go back to Intel.

Sure, the battery life and not overheating is great, but you are limited to Arm based solutions, when installing linux VMs for example. Or gaming. Everyone seems to have forgotten how awesome it was to be able to do everything on one machine.

It is a compromise I live with, not something I prefer.

And at least half of Apple’s benefit comes from process technology, where the gap will be closing very soon, if for no other reason than the fact that after 2nm there is not much more room to grow with silicon, so even laggards will have time to catch up on process and yields.

The would has been running on x86 for so long it’s a waste to just decide to rework so many chunks of it.

biehl2• 4 years ago

I am getting one of these https://dk.starlabs.systems/pages/desktops to go with my M1 to run x86 based VMs, docker and similar stuff. An extra expense, but hopefully a good combination.

KerrAvon3• 4 years ago

Macs are not and never will be ideal for gaming. Apple execs don’t care about gaming, don’t understand it, are not interested in it, are not willing to do what is necessary to excel in gaming. Lots of people at Apple are working on game-adjacent technologies and their efforts are doomed because the execs sabotage every gaming opportunity eventually.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

And at least half of Apple’s benefit comes from process technology…

Apple's performance-per-watt advantage is boosted by process improvements, but nothing I've read attributes anything close to half of that advantage to process. (References would be welcome.)

"Chips manufactured with this [3nm] process deliver 30% improvements in power consumption and 15% better performance in comparison with 5nm chips." https://www.computerworld.com/article/3609778/apple-on-track...

tromp• 4 years ago

It also integrates Intel’s DDR5 PHYs supporting 5600 MT/s rates

I had to look up [1] that MT/s is short for megatransfers (or million transfers) per second. Compared to specifying memory speed in Mhz, it better reflects that DDR doubles the amount of transfers per clock cycle.

[1] https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/mts-vs-mhz

abainbridge• 4 years ago

Ahhh, that's why MT/s exists. All I need to know now is how many data bits are in a transfer and how many memory channels there are, and I'll be able to calculate how fast the memory interface is.

retskrad• 4 years ago

The M1 was released in 2020 and AMD and Intel are still unable to compete in performance per watt. I can't believe that Intel and AMD have their current market cap. Investors should know by now that they make gasoline cars and Apple makes EV's. They are that far ahead.

Comevius2• 4 years ago

They are completely different markets, the M1 and M2 are part of Apple's consumer devices, mostly premium notebooks running macOS. That's a niche market even compared to premium notebooks running Windows.

klelatti17• 4 years ago

That's a niche market even compared to premium notebooks running Windows.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion?

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Performance per watt is something no one cares about. Laptops are a tiny market compared to servers. I'm pretty sure desktops are even a larger market. I'd rather have a beefy desktop PC than a laptop that's fundamentally handicapped by cooling problems.

brucehoult3• 4 years ago

The only people who don't care about performance per Watt are those who have only one computer with a handful of cores and it is running off mains power.

People running from batteries care a lot about performance per Watt.

So do people running thousands or tens of thousands of computers in a warehouse. Not only does the electricity to run the computers cost more than the computers themselves, but it also costs a lot of money to build and run the cooling systems.

klelatti17• 4 years ago

Lots of comment here about Intel adopting RISC-V or Arm and what this means for x86. I think it's worth considering the commercial issues from Intel's (and AMD's) perspective.

Firstly, adopting Arm would mean giving their blessing to an architecture that is now competing with x86 head on in key markets. That would only accelerate the demise of x86. So unless they have absolutely world beating products available on day 1, I don't think that's going to happen.

Secondly, adopting either architecture means that they would remove a key part of the 'x86 moat' and open up competition from anyone else with deep pockets who can put together a top quality silicon design team.

So I think it's likely that ultimately - whatever ISA they adopt - they will look for any way they can to distinguish themselves from the competition and avoid the commoditisation of their products.

Finally, just to add that supporting RISC-V - which is clearly competing successfully with Arm at the low end at the moment - helps to weaken a competitor so might be seen as a shrewd commercial move irrespective of any longer term plans.

jabl5• 4 years ago

This. I wonder why so many seem so eager to engage in the fantasy that Intel (and AMD) are planning to jump ship to ARM or RISC-V.

Yes, ISA's matter, to a point. And yes, ARM64 and RISC-V are much closer to 'best practice' ISA design than x86 with all its legacy baggage. But enough better to make AMD&Intel throw away the x86 market and their position in that as explained in the parent comment? No effing way.

klelatti17• 4 years ago

I forgot to add that there is the risk of 'Osborning'[1] x86 on day 1 of announcing a move to a new architecture as they effectively declare it a 'legacy' product.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

ksec• 4 years ago

That is RISC-V Evangelism Strikeforce at work.

viraptor• 4 years ago

Not that I expect it to happen any time soon, but Intel and AMD are proving with every release they have nothing for energy efficient machines. M1 battery is almost always the first thing people mention. And as M2 gets released, more people will get used/cheaper M1s. Companies release more aarch64-compatible software and even games every day.

At some point the x86 companies will either have to respond or see more and more people migrate to either Apple or other arm laptops (serious alternatives are not here yet, but a few producers are starting to experiment)

hajile5• 4 years ago

Intel has tried to move away from x86 three times already. They only stuck with it in the early 2000s because AMD64 forced their hand.

This chip shows why Intel would like RISC-V. The core ISA is RISC-V, but every other piece of the chip is proprietary and patented Intel stuff. They are far ahead of almost everyone in these areas, so they don't have much to fear in their current markets from the ISA itself.

Few companies have the ability, desire, or connections to spend billions designing a next-gen chip. China has thoroughly proved this. They have designed for x86, Alpha, MIPS, ARM, RISC-V, etc, but none of their designs were particularly good. For example, they recently released their Phytium D2000 chip. It was basically a clone of A72 with improvements, but chips and cheese analysis[0] showed that the supposed improvements actually resulted in a worse design.

If designing a good high-performance chip was down to just ISA, then everyone would be doing it.

Meanwhile, x86 patents for SSE2 and before have expired (with SSE3 expiring in 2023-4). Analysis of real-world code shows that only a couple percent use something beyond SSE3 and pretty much all of that has fallbacks for SSE2. There's already not much left to keep companies from designing x86-compatible chips (Apple's Rosetta x86 compatibility tracks this expiration exactly).

At the same time, x86 is incapable of competing in MCU and DSP markets and Intel's phone offerings were flatly rejected and only competitive when they had the huge advantage of being a couple fabrication nodes ahead of their competitors. Intel paid billions trying to make it happen, but never had many sales outside of the lemonade they made in the embedded market.

Intel and AMD would far rather have a non-proprietary solution like RISC-V win than a proprietary one like ARM.

[0] https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/09/29/chinas-phytium-d2000-b...

andromeduck5• 4 years ago

I think offering a RISC-V + full featured x86 option could be a pretty big differentiator during the transition. They'd have to be really sure of out competing competitors though.

Short of that, I expect ARM or RISC-V to become the dominant ISA on server and clients come 3-7 years and where do they go from there? Become the next PPC?

klelatti17• 4 years ago

What do you mean by 'RISC-V + full featured x86 option'?

webmobdev2• 4 years ago

First, the whole point of RISC-V is that if you use it to create new processors, you do not have to pay any licensing fees to anyone. If you want to use the ARM or x86 or AMD64 instruction set in a new processor, you will have to pay a license fee to the owners of these instruction set (Arm, Intel or AMD respectively). Due to the cross-licensing agreement that Intel and AMD have with each other to license each others instruction set (x86 and AMD64), it has negligible financial impact on their profit margins.

Second, Intel and AMD's x86 and AMD64 are the dominant platform on server and desktop market today. ARM instruction set architecture (ISA) dominates the mobile platform and is only now competing with Intel and AMD on the desktop and server market. If Intel or AMD drop support for x86 and AMD64, and migrate to ARM, it will make ARM the dominant ISA on which all IoT, mobile, desktop and server softwares run. This is obviously not in Intel or AMD's interest. Migrating to RISC-V would mean they have to help promote a completely new ISA and help developers migrate their software to it. Doing so will also kill the x86 and AMD64 platform.

So unless RISC-V ISA actually offers some real technical advantage (like drastically lowering the power requirement and boosting computing performance) it really makes no sense for Intel and AMD to shift to it.

Note that the news here is not that Intel and SiFive have built a RISC-V chip but how SiFive (who have ventured into making RISC-V chips) has partnered with Intel Foundry Service to make the chips in Intel's fab. This is Intel diversifying to also make chips for others in its foundry like, Samsung and TSMC already do.

fmajid2• 4 years ago

China is moving to RISC-V to remove its dependency on amd64 and arm64, and thus to US sanctions since Intel/AMD and ARM are subject to US law.

Intel wants to keep the ability to serve the Chinese market, that means in the long terms having RISC-V offerings, hence the investment in SiFive.

Unlike Ottelini, Gelsinger is not a bean-counter who sold off StrongARM/XScale to Marvell and thus made Intel irrelevant to the ARM market, and by extension to mobile computing.

sylware• 4 years ago

RISC-V is an ISA free from toxic IP "à la" mpeg/hdmi/arm/x86 (only barbaric countries where this IP is legal though).

"Write RISC-V assembly, run everywhere..."

It seems they are cheeky people trying to link RISC-V with the current tensions between the US and China. China saw the opportunity of RISC-V and it is pushing hard (like literaly the entire world should). But RISC-V is a US initiative, with the obsvious intention to become a international standard for interoperability of CPUs as the assembly level, that extremely stable in time. India has also RISC-V CPUs, and if everything goes well for RISC-V, its spread should reach more and more CPU designers all around the world further in time. But ARM and x86_64 licence holders (where this licence is legal) may try to torpedo it (probably from the shadows ofc).

retrocryptid2• 4 years ago

Former SiFive employee here...

Sure, RISC-V is the wave of the future, but there's more to a hot chip than an open/free ISA. RISC-V is a few years out from directly competing w/ Intel, but it's advancing very quickly.

Also worth looking at what StarFive is doing. They seemed to avoid a few corporate missteps SiFive fell prey to (no. I'm not saying SiFive is dying. I'm saying StarFive was able to learn from SiFive's mistakes and seem to be growing even faster.)

The RISC-V community still feels very "academic" and seems to eschew people with real-world experience. Maybe that's for the better. Maybe it's better to ignore the things industry did wrong in the past. But If you're from the Arm or MIPS communities, it feels a tiny bit stuffy. Also, you need a Ph.D. to be taken seriously.

Most importantly... I would really love to buy one of these boards. But it sounds like that's in the distant future.

gautamcgoel• 4 years ago

"The SoC integrates Intel’s own PCIe 5.0 PHY with x8 lanes along with Synopsys PCIe 5 Controller. It also integrates Intel’s DDR5 PHYs supporting 5600 MT/s rates along with Cadence’s memory controller."

Naive question: why didn't they just use Intel memory controllers and Intel PCI controllers?

mhh__3• 4 years ago

Synopsys and Cadence sell a lot of that kind of thing so they might've been things they were already using whereas the PCIe is more process-specific.

Intel, SiFive Demo High-Performance RISC-V on Intel 4

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