A Big Week for RISC-V

Re:A Big Week for RISC-V by gumby on Sunday February 13, 2022 @01:12PM (#30323988)

Apple has been an ARM licensee since they were a founding shareholder in ARM. They used it in the Newton, but now of course it's ubiquitous in their products.

The effort to design their own instruction set (including all the tooling) would not be trivial, but probably not enormous for them given their scale. And given their scale, their license must be cheaper than the cost of that activity, because you know Cook would pay it if it would save them enough down the road.

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Re:A Big Week for RISC-V by justahuman74 on Sunday February 13, 2022 @03:34PM (#30325372)

Apple has deep pockets, but using an existing ISA gives you a lot of OSS porting and optimization work for free. They could just use RISC-V if they wanted to and still have all the flexibility they want.

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Re:A Big Week for RISC-V by gumby on Sunday February 13, 2022 @05:51PM (#30326407)

Given the amount of software they write from scratch, and that they have their own tool chains, the actual ISA is below Apple’s noise floor. I’m sure they spend more on optimizing for the quirks (cache size, instruction timing, etc) of each generation of chip.

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