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posted by hubie on Friday June 03 2022, @04:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the riscy-business dept.

From Tom's Hardware:

Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) said they would invest €400 million (around $426 million) in a laboratory that will develop RISC-V-based processors that could be used to build zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not focus solely on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers but also on processor uses for artificial intelligence applications and autonomous vehicles.

The research laboratory will presumably be set up in Barcelona, Spain, and will receive €400 million from Intel and the Spanish Government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research laboratory is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that could be used for a wide range of applications, including AI accelerators, autonomous vehicles, and high-performance computing.

The creation of the joint laboratory does not automatically mean that Intel will use RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year, Intel tried to buy SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and is among the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a non-profit organization supporting the ISA.

[....] throughout its history, Intel invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64/Itanium in the 1990s and the 2000s). Eventually, those architectures were dropped, but technologies developed for them found their way into x86 offerings.

I would observe that a simple well designed instruction set could require less silicon. Possibly more cores per chip using same fabrication technology. Or more speculative execution branch prediction using up some of that silicon. I would mention compiler back ends, but that is a subject best not discussed in public.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 06 2022, @05:55AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday June 06 2022, @05:55AM (#1250866) Journal

    If you had said MS-DOS, including Windows 3.1, and said the hardware of the late 1980s not just the x86 instruction set, you'd be correct. You could even say that's so of Windows 95 and Windows 98, since they are still fundamentally DOS under the hood. But the x86 instruction set alone is not a big barrier. 16bit vs 32bit vs 64bit is not much of a barrier to porting. It's the techniques of the times that are the biggest barrier. In particular, there was all kinds of 3D graphics done in software, including the use of terrible hacks and limitations, which simply is neither necessary nor desirable today. The first Doom games are examples of this. The worst you're going to get in plain x86 code is stuff such as software implementation of floating point math, for those x86 machines that didn't have a math coprocessor, and awkward workarounds for missing functionality, such as in the 386 and earlier, the lack of an atomic instruction for testing and setting a flag which is necessary to easily implement multitasking.

    In principle, it's always possible to reimplement functionality from scratch. Any software that's valuable enough will be reimplemented, if there is no other easier or more practical way. Usually an emulator is available.

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