The development and availability of RISC-V implementations will probably accelerate rapidly now that NVIDIA have bought Arm. Hopefully some will be produced without the optional proprietary extensions — there is now a general acceptance that open-source hardware is essential in respect of security and verified chains of trust.
EDIT: see also https://live-risc-v.pantheonsite.io/blo ... on-risc-v/
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The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
- Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
So ... what's Your problem? ... You don't like the arguments which You can't beat in the discussion or what?pylkko wrote:You had an argument with nearly everyone on this forum. Then, I remember that you had a bigger one with somebody and left saying that you will never come back, Tomazzi.
I've joined the forums again only to post a "How to" automate re-clocking with nouveau driver - but somehow it turned out that I'm going to stay here for a longer time ... (but my post counter have started counting from zero, so my "rank" is not as high as Yours - take it ease man )
The only problem I have with the RISC-V is that it's not a revolutionary project, no matter what aspect You'll choose to judge it on.Head_on_a_Stick wrote:The development and availability of RISC-V implementations will probably accelerate rapidly now that NVIDIA have bought Arm. Hopefully some will be produced without the optional proprietary extensions — there is now a general acceptance that open-source hardware is essential in respect of security and verified chains of trust.
EDIT: see also https://live-risc-v.pantheonsite.io/blo ... on-risc-v/
Therefore all I want to say is:
a) there's no single technical reason to go for RISC-V
b) the above means that RISC-V was created only for political reasons, not for technical ones.
Regards
Bill Gates: "(...) In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
The_full_story and Nothing_have_changed
The_full_story and Nothing_have_changed
- Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
I would consider the open-source nature of RISC-V to be a technical advantage — security cannot be guaranteed if the ISA is proprietary.LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote:a) there's no single technical reason to go for RISC-V
b) the above means that RISC-V was created only for political reasons, not for technical ones.
deadbang
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Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
Ehh, so I have to explain it again:Head_on_a_Stick wrote:I would consider the open-source nature of RISC-V to be a technical advantage — security cannot be guaranteed if the ISA is proprietary.
ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) is a *document* which defines a set of special numbers, called operation codes or opcodes for short, which have to be understood by the CPU which conforms to that ISA specification - nothing else, it's just a document.
The ISA document does not define *how* the hardware interpreter is performing the operations defined by opcodes - and therefore it *does not* define how the digital circuits would have to be designed to interpret the opcodes (this is the same situation like in case of AMD and Intel or Broadcom vs Samsung CPUs) - the hardware is still closed.
In addition, the RISC-V ISA *document* (specification) *guarantees* that some specific range of opcode numbers are allowed to be used by some undefined proprietary extensions.
Here's an example what proprietary extensions could mean:
The CPU equipped with proprietary extensions can for example virtualize all the OS-es that are running on it, what allows to bypass all the security measures implemented in that virtualized OS-es.
This means:
a) The closed-source bootloader can virtualize the installed OS-es and allow to access its vital data from the outside world (just like in case of Intel's v-pro)
b) The CPU can have unofficial instructions for bypassing f.e. the MMU - even when the OS is not virtualized by the bootloader, that would allow to access any area of system memory by specially crafted applications, downloaded from google store
Bill Gates: "(...) In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
The_full_story and Nothing_have_changed
The_full_story and Nothing_have_changed
Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
One could speculate, how much should it cost for everyday PC builders to even consider it?Head_on_a_Stick wrote:New mini-ITX board from SiFive using their U740 64-bit multi-core RISC-V processor:
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
This is a more affordable replacement for the old "Unleashed" board and has M.2 slots for an NVMe drive & wireless card along with an x16 PCIe slot.
Product brief: https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/c0 ... sed%29.pdf
EDIT: just by way of comparison the functionality is about the same as the old Unleashed board plus the expansion board, which together retailed for ~$3,000. The Unmatched board has an expected price of $665.
I wonder if the boot process will be entirely open in this new board also? In the old board the M-mode firmware was entirely available on github. And I believe at least the ZSBL ROM could be read from user space (not sure about the rest). H-mode could be done by OpenSBI. Also it had ports for libreboot and U-boot (and even oreboot a libreboot port written in Rust). As far as I know, this guaranteed a entirely open source boot flow from initial ROM initialization to linux (in addition to the entirely open implementation of the ISA in the processor). I think the software/firmware is just as important as the open hardware.
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Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
Difficult to say at this stage, there is a firmware placeholder on the web page but no link as yet.pylkko wrote:I wonder if the boot process will be entirely open in this new board also?
deadbang
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Re: The first Linux-ready, 64-bit RISC-V SoC
New board from BeagleV:
https://beaglev.seeed.cc/
It will have a dual-core U74 (64-bit RISC-V from SiFive) with a Vision DSP chip for the video outputs. Unfortunately it also has an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator for "AI" applications so that's probably not open source at all but otherwise it looks good and $149 for the 8GiB version is pretty cheap for RISC-V.
https://beaglev.seeed.cc/
It will have a dual-core U74 (64-bit RISC-V from SiFive) with a Vision DSP chip for the video outputs. Unfortunately it also has an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator for "AI" applications so that's probably not open source at all but otherwise it looks good and $149 for the 8GiB version is pretty cheap for RISC-V.
deadbang