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A comment on BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux. Parent comment

Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by tyingq on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:28AM (#25762318)
I think in the real world "No percentage of each sale payments to ARM" is what will drive RISC-V. An "open" ISA doesn't force anything else to be open.

So, use cases like Western Digital, where they can quit paying ARM a percentage of every hard drive they sell, for example.

As for technical advantages, each RISCV vendor has their own choice of how to implement, so it's hard to say anything broad that applies to all RISCV implementations. The Berkeley BOOM project is hitting really good DMIPS/MHz numbers. LowRISC has some interesting memory tagging and "minion core" ideas, etc.

Edit: I left out perhaps the most important reason RISCV has a lot of hype. They've been successful getting first class support from the Linux kernel maintainers.

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by pjc50 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:01AM (#25763720)
> quit paying ARM a percentage

The percentage is very small, though. So this argument only works for very high volume use cases, which is why the RISC-V eval boards are currently far more expensive than comparable ARMs.

Do WD do their own silicon yet, or do they just buy the parts?

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by nickik on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:05PM (#25764866)
WD has their own cores and they are OpenSource. Very nice designs. They also spend a lot of money on the open source ecosystem for chip development.

See:

- https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v

- https://chipsalliance.org/

- https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-SweRV

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by reportingsjr on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:26AM (#25764183)
How many ARM microcontrollers are low volume? Pretty much all of the examples I can think of are incredibly high volume. STM32, SAMD21/51, i.MX, etc.

WD said they were finishing taping out their first production design about a year and a half ago, so I assume they have started shipping them at this point, but it's hard to find info.

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by blihp on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:59PM (#25765657)
Hasn't WD been doing their own silicon (at least from a design standpoint, they still use someone else's fab) precisely because the 'small percentage' ARM charges matters for their margins? In a world where we have ESP-01 boards which retail for $2, even a couple of percent matters.
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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by Narishma on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:05AM (#25763822)
They design them. I don't know if they make them or not.
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