Improbable Insights

I recently attended part of the RISC-V workshop at the Google campus. RISC-V is a fully open source CPU instruction set developed at UC Berkeley developed by Krste Asanovic, Andrew Waterman, and Yunsup Lee. An academic instruction set is all well and good, but the RISC-V spawned SiFive, which plans on building commercial processors using RISC-V. Can RISC-V and SiFive compete against ARM? More appropriately, can SiFive compete against smaller, agile proprietary players like Andes Technology, Synopsys, and Cortus? Unlike operating systems like Linux and BSD, CPUs need externalities such as semiconductor fabs -- taping out a processor costs a bunch of money and wafer starts are not cheap. Eric and I discuss the open source model, and how it might apply to processors, and what companies like SiFive might need to do in order to succeed against the likes of Intel, ARM, and others. Tools I talk about the rare times I have to edit PDFs and what tools do I use. I also discover that it's easy to repair cycling shoes, A