Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by floatboth on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @08:58PM (#26964112)

At the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired.

RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by edrxty on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @10:50PM (#26964932)

This is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is rarely the goal for small-to-medium projects.

Example:

https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by saagarjha on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @02:19AM (#26966274)

I don’t think the claim was that tooling could not handle these custom instructions; I think the claim was that nobody wants custom instructions in cross-platform software.

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