Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Slowly but surely, RISC-V, the Open Source architecture for everything from microcontrollers to server CPUs is making inroads in the community. Now SiFive, the major company behind putting RISC-V c...
That's damned nifty but at a grand for a 1.5GHz system, I don't see them selling that many to consumers.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/02/03/sifive-introduces-risc-v-linux-capable-multicore-processor/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @09:59AM (4 children)
It should be known since the days of the Intel Pentium that it is not the GHz that matters, but the operations per second. I have no idea how this system compares to a contemporary AMD/Intel chip, but I can imagine that the more direct (and thus simpler) RISC architecture allows to do more operations in parallel by utilizing the resources that other processors use for interpreting the instructions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @11:07AM
Doubt that (better branch prediction, instruction reordering, etc.), besides all x86_64 architectures are RISC under the bonnet, anyway.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday February 05 2018, @11:37AM
Too reductionist. It doesn't do to ignore caching and branch-prediction. Real-world performance is the only meaningful measure of real-world performance.
Computer architectural matters aren't so easily reduced. I believe the major CPU architecture most similar to RISC-V is MIPS. MIPS does ok, and like ARM it reliably outperforms Intel on power-per-watt (at least it did last I checked), but RISC isn't a magic sauce. Design is hard, and ISA differences aren't everything.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 05 2018, @01:45PM
FTFY. Clock speed always matters. Even on a single task chip that's had every bit of the logic moved from software to hardware and optimized to its physically possible limits.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @06:38PM
In the days of the Intel Pentium, it was never the Ghz that mattered, because the notion of even talking about Ghz in the first place was years away.
The Mhz, otoh...I had a 133 MHz machine, that thing was sweet. Use it to pivot around the ol' high school firewall and get on IRC in class.