Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Five semiconductor companies make a new RISC-V company.
Qualcomm and four other significant semiconductor firms have officially joined forces to establish Quintauris, a company focused on developing "next-generation hardware" based on the RISC-V open-standard architecture (via Business Wire). The self-stated mission of Quintauris is to provide a single source for enabling RISC-V devices and promote standards for the RISC-V industry, which has been criticized for being prone to fragmentation.
RISC-V is an open-standard (or open-source, depending on who you ask) instruction set architecture (ISA) for CPUs that was first established in 2014, and is maintained by RISC-V International. The basic premise for RISC-V is that any company can take the ISA and make their own CPUs, bypassing the closed ecosystems of Arm, AMD, and Intel. Since its debut, RISC-V has grown extremely quickly, with 16 billion cores sold forecasted by 2030.
Qualcomm is invested in the production of Arm architecture-based chips, so it might seem unintuitive for the company to get into RISC-V too. However, Qualcomm has actually been using RISC-V for five years for its microcontrollers, as have many other companies. Qualcomm is also using RISC-V for its Snapdragon Wear Platform, alongside Google. As a reduced instruction set computer architecture (which is what RISC means), RISC-V is inherently minimalistic, and it's found a niche in small chips.
[...] According to its official website, Quintauris says its products will initially focus on the automotive industry and then later cater to mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The company is also focused on promoting standards for the RISC-V hardware-software ecosystem, and the implication appears to be that the launch of successful products developed by several big companies will help realize standardization.
Quintauris isn't the only organization seeking to inject standards into the world of RISC-V however, as there is also the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE). RISE has the official support of RISC-V International and key industry players such as Google, Intel, Nvidia, and even Qualcomm. While RISE concentrates on software, Quintauris will champion next-generation hardware development.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday December 27, @03:33PM (1 child)
I recall hearing on the LibreSOC mailing list that they couldn't base their architecture on RISC because to propose any additional functionality they had to sign nondisclosure. Instead, they ended up switching to IBM's OpenPower, which imposed no such restrictions.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday December 27, @09:19PM
Protecting the standard from being fractured (multiple extensions using the same namespace) means having to have a level of control. There's also patent-copyright interaction issues as well as needing to coordinate the work of different members to make it possible for them to collaborate without them trying to vendor lock key architecture designs via patents... IBM solves this by controlling the patent pool and making members pay for discovery and sign a form of non-compete so they won't patent troll each other. RISC-V is more BSD (Vs. GPL) in that it just tries to keep ethical issues and the core implementation from forking and breaking.
Btw, weirdest arrangement I've seen is Mitch Alsup's My66000 ISA (who I believe had some involvement in LibreSOC?) where you need to contact Alsup's email directly for a copy of the docs... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, considering open88, I'm assuming Alsup has a good reason to go through this particular process.
Either way, open standards are a legalese clusterfuck.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday December 28, @10:57PM
A few months ago Qualcomm proposed dropping the 16bit instructions (c extension) from the application profile in favor of making room for floating point instructions and were met with wall-to-wall opposition: https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/topic/101741936 [riscv.org]
There's a lot of layers to this (Profiles already being ratified... Embedded, mobile and server loads and binary compatibility versus HPC's... Patents... Trying to get more compatible with x86 codepaths... Butthurt...) but this Quintauris seems to be a "soft" fork that will poll some patents and roll their own profiles and distro builds for specific clients' needs.
Anyhow, it's just normal open source drama and Qualcomm hasn't dropped from RISC-V so they're not betting the farm on this so I give it 2-3 gens at most before one of the sides proves their case with real hardware in the market and the issue resolved itself.
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