FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That’s not really true. Yes avoiding complex instructions makes the front end easier to pipeline but there are lots of smarts in the backend to do prediction and scheduling to keep the execution units fed. The ISA might be free to use but no one is sharing their highly optimised server silicon architecture designs.

    RISC-V’s challenge is can they standardise the software ecosystem enough that things just work across a multitude of chip providers or does everything devolve into specialist distributions taking advantage of each manufacturers “special sauce” custom instructions.

    Gaining design wins over Arm’s microcontrollers for bespoke hardware was the easy bit. Replacing stuff in the server space is much harder and something that took Arm decades to make inroads into.









  • I used to think about it a lot when I was younger because it seemed so unfair that life comes to an end. As I’ve gotten older (and closer to the inevitable) I think about it less. Hopefully you’ll get to the point you realise worrying about something you can’t change isn’t productive use of the time you have left. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do what you can to eat well, keep fit and put off that final reckoning as much as you can.