> I believe that an average computer science student could come up with a better instruction set that Risc V in a single term project.
When you hear the "<person / group> could make a better <implementation> in <short time period>" - call them out. Do it. The world will not shun a better open license ISA. We even have some pretty awesome FPGA boards these days that would allow you to prototype your own ISA at home.
In terms of the market - now is an exceptionally great time to go back to the design room. It's not as if anybody will be manufacturing much during the next year with all of the fab labs unable to make existing chips to meet demand. There is a window of opportunity here.
> It is, more-or-less a watered down version of the 30 year old Alpha ISA after all. (Alpha made sense at its time, with the transistor budget available at the time.)
As I see it, lower numbers of transistors could also be a good thing. It seems blatantly obvious at this point that multi-core software is not only here to stay, but is the future. Lower numbers of transistors means squeezing more cores onto the same silicon, or implementing larger caches, etc.
I also really like the Unix philosophy of doing one simple thing well. Sure, it could have some special instruction that does exactly your use case in one cycle using all the registers, but that's not what has created such advances in general purpose computing.
> Sure, it is "clean" but just to make it clean, there was no reason to be naive.
I would much rather we build upon a conceptually clean instruction set, rather than trying to hobble together hacks on top of fundamentally flawed designs - even at the cost of performance. It's exactly these hobbled conceptual hacks that have lead to the likes of spectre and meltdown vulnerabilities, when the instruction sets become so complicate that they cannot be easily tested.
Yeah. I don't have a dog in this fight... I don't have strong opinions either way, and this is one of those arguments that will be settled by reality after some time goes by.
But the author making an argument like that...
> I believe that an average computer science student could come up with a better instruction set that Risc V in a single term project.
Pretty much blew their credibility. It's obviously wrong, and a sensible, fair person wouldn't write it.
> Do it. The world will not shun a better open license ISA.
When you use a CPU architecture you don't just get an ISA.
You also get compilers and debuggers. Ready-to-run Linux images. JIT compilers for JavaScript and Java. Debian repos and Python wheels with binaries.
And you get CPUs with all the most complex features. Instruction re-ordering, branch prediction, multiple cores, multi-level caches, dynamic frequency and voltage control. You want an onboard GPU, with hardware 4k h264 encoding and decoding? No problem.
And you get a wealth of community knowledge - there are forum posts and StackOverflow questions where people might have encountered your problems before. If you're hiring, there are loads of engineers who've done a bit of stuff with that architecture before. And of course vendors actually making the silicon!
I've seen ISAs documented with a single sheet of A4 paper. The difficult part in having a successful CPU architecture is all the other stuff :)
>As I see it, lower numbers of transistors could also be a good thing. It seems blatantly obvious at this point that multi-core software is not only here to stay, but is the future. Lower numbers of transistors means squeezing more cores onto the same silicon, or implementing larger caches, etc.
How about some 32 way SMT GPUs... No more divergence!
When you hear the "<person / group> could make a better <implementation> in <short time period>" - call them out. Do it. The world will not shun a better open license ISA. We even have some pretty awesome FPGA boards these days that would allow you to prototype your own ISA at home.
In terms of the market - now is an exceptionally great time to go back to the design room. It's not as if anybody will be manufacturing much during the next year with all of the fab labs unable to make existing chips to meet demand. There is a window of opportunity here.
> It is, more-or-less a watered down version of the 30 year old Alpha ISA after all. (Alpha made sense at its time, with the transistor budget available at the time.)
As I see it, lower numbers of transistors could also be a good thing. It seems blatantly obvious at this point that multi-core software is not only here to stay, but is the future. Lower numbers of transistors means squeezing more cores onto the same silicon, or implementing larger caches, etc.
I also really like the Unix philosophy of doing one simple thing well. Sure, it could have some special instruction that does exactly your use case in one cycle using all the registers, but that's not what has created such advances in general purpose computing.
> Sure, it is "clean" but just to make it clean, there was no reason to be naive.
I would much rather we build upon a conceptually clean instruction set, rather than trying to hobble together hacks on top of fundamentally flawed designs - even at the cost of performance. It's exactly these hobbled conceptual hacks that have lead to the likes of spectre and meltdown vulnerabilities, when the instruction sets become so complicate that they cannot be easily tested.