I wish i could understand it all… Can somebody please explain all this a bit more? It sounds good, but i don’t get half of it.
I’ll give it a go…
General
- It’s getting harder to make processors faster
- Adding extra RISC-V or ARM processors to computers to do certain tasks is a great way to add speed while keeping power efficiency.
- ISA is a language for communicating with a processor
RISC-V’s ISA
- As a newer ISA, it’s learnt from the mistakes of the past
- Has six different instructions which is very few.
- The instructions use less memory.
- There’s extended instructions and space to write new instructions so it’s versatile.
- It can hold quadruple-precision floating point numbers which is apparently great for working with huge datasets?
- Capable of 128-bit addressing as well as 32-bit and 64-bit
- Moving from 32 to 64, or 64 to 128 is slower because you have to process the instruction in two halves but you get the benefit of more addressable space.
- 128-bit isn’t useful for home computers or most servers.
- Large datacenters can need it because it allows them to go beyond 16 exabytes of space.
Licensing
- Computers are faster if they’re designed with the ISA in mind
- ARM requires license holders to use their hardware designs for this reason, the licenses are very expensive and only top tier licenses (like Apple’s) are free to use any hardware.
- RISC-V is a free license so you can use it any way you want and your product can be cheaper because there’s no fees.
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Ok. That’s better. Now i understand a lot more of what i’ve read in the article. Thank you for this!