I suspect most of RISC-V development is more towards moving away from western controlled ISA's that can be sanctioned for any reason. Points about avoid shortages from any fab being allowed to fabricate RISC-V CPUs is just the "cherry on top".
Very nice to see RISC-V growing like that and being in the area of interest by big names such as Google and Intel. Open solutions are critical for risk management but I wonder if desktop/server RISC-V processors are also planned.
There's so much more to a chip than its ISA. I'm not sure how the ISA changes anything. If I design a board around an STM32, for instance, even within that family I'd have to find a chip that has the same exact footprint to be able to replace one that I couldn't find. And even then, I'd like have to reconfigure the software ...<p>So unless there was a pin-for-pin/electrical standard for chips, the ISA is of no effect.
What I don't get is there's millions of "good enough" e-waste motherboards, RAM, CPUs etc. out there. Wouldn't recycling be better than having nothing or waiting indefinitely? Are there that many workloads that can only run on brand new hardware?
not just the chip shortage. The rise of RISC-V coincides with a couple of other events in the industry. The first is the slowing of Moore’s Law, meaning that increases in total processing power no longer comes along with each new fabrication node. The second is the meteoric rise in machine learning, demanding massive increases in processing power. <a href="https://semiengineering.com/why-risc-v-is-succeeding/" rel="nofollow">https://semiengineering.com/why-risc-v-is-succeeding/</a>
I am personally very excited for RISC-V. I like the boot process of OpenSBI/U-Boot, can also directly boot a Linux kernel. So far I have only used the qemu virt machine w/ riscv64 cpu. OpenBSD and Debian/Ubuntu have great support, I have ordered a VisionFive board, curious to see how well it runs on physical hardware
I found it to be completely orthogonal how switching to a different ISA will solve the issue of lack of underlying physical semiconductor manufacturing capacity.
Access to high purity quartz is the real bottle neck. You can have your own fabs and designs.. but if America and Russia refuse to sell you some Quartz.. you are out of luck!<p><a href="https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/high-purity-quartz-market.asp#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20significant%20factors%20impeding%20industry,for%20more%20than%2095%25%20of%20global%20HPQ%20production" rel="nofollow">https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hi...</a>.