By: Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com), November 8, 2019 2:32 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Adrian (a.delete@this.acm.org) on November 7, 2019 8:38 am wrote:
> RISC-V has always had only one advantage: ignoring the weird SPARC, it was
> the only royalty-free ISA for which one had a complete set of tools, i.e. compilers,
> assembler & linker, so that there was no need to develop those.
Actually all those tools have only recently reached a level of quality that's comparable to other architectures. RISC-V support was upstreamed in GCC in 2017, in LLVM & Linux this year. It's not like the original RISC-V ISA had excellent tooling support.
The key difference is that the teams working on RISC-V support immediately started working with upstream projects to get it supported. Unlike some notorious companies who for a long, long time forced their customers to use their absolutely horrible internal toolchains; helping out FOSS toolchains only after being dragged kicking and screaming.
> Unlike for ARM, I do not see any chance for RISC-V to be ever useful in a
> personal computer, unless it would be a variant so extended that it will have
> little but the name in common with the initial RISC-V specification.
AArch64 has very little but the name in common with the original ARM ISA. Arguably x86-64 is closer to 8086 than that, but barely so. That's how every ISA evolves over time.
> RISC-V has always had only one advantage: ignoring the weird SPARC, it was
> the only royalty-free ISA for which one had a complete set of tools, i.e. compilers,
> assembler & linker, so that there was no need to develop those.
Actually all those tools have only recently reached a level of quality that's comparable to other architectures. RISC-V support was upstreamed in GCC in 2017, in LLVM & Linux this year. It's not like the original RISC-V ISA had excellent tooling support.
The key difference is that the teams working on RISC-V support immediately started working with upstream projects to get it supported. Unlike some notorious companies who for a long, long time forced their customers to use their absolutely horrible internal toolchains; helping out FOSS toolchains only after being dragged kicking and screaming.
> Unlike for ARM, I do not see any chance for RISC-V to be ever useful in a
> personal computer, unless it would be a variant so extended that it will have
> little but the name in common with the initial RISC-V specification.
AArch64 has very little but the name in common with the original ARM ISA. Arguably x86-64 is closer to 8086 than that, but barely so. That's how every ISA evolves over time.