Posted by dmitrygr 1 day ago
Similarly, I kept saying it for long that a file/wire format's usefulness is not in what it supports, but in what it forbids. A binary file supports any type of data, but it's not useful.
I want the iteration of the product that is in its 2nd or 3rd official iteration. Where you have a lot of learning done and battle tested. Preferably without the backward compatibility to create something truly beautiful. Would it be perfect? Of course not. But it will be Great.
I so wish ARM had some counter offering. They might as well give away their their low end design for free.
What I am interested in is the idea doing an AArch64 style revamp of the ISA, were much of the non-encoding semantic stuff is kept, but the entire instruction encoding (plus all the CSRs, and other things) are reworked to be sane.
You might even do two reworkings in parallel, with one variable-width encoding optimised for microcontrollers, thumb-style; And the other being a fixed-width encoding optimised for wide out-of-order cores.
And at the same time, you make a bunch of extensions mandatory, and unify others into bigger chunks; Code compiled to one of these two encodings would know it had access to a much wider range of instructions.
The idea would be that any C code targeting RISC-V can be compiled to this encoding with close to zero changes, and that mechanical translation of exiting RISC-V binary code should be "possible", as none of the underlying semantics have changed. And the same would help any core wanting to natively support both (or all three) encodings, you would only need a front-end translator.
> None of this is to say that RISC-V is doomed. As I said, I fully expect it to take over the space currently occupied by [...] Much like the linux kernel -- the price is right.
I basically disagree with this. Not because this isn't the current state of things (it absolutely is), but because we're at a bit of an inflection point where mooore's law has proved itself to be an scurve, and we're very clearly well into the top half of it. From that, gate counts per core will also start to ossify, and that means the longer latency for getting an open core design off the ground initially will also start to make sense.
While RISC-V is quite optimised for gate count for small cores; In large wide OoO cores the variable length encoding really bulks out the decoders.
You basically have the same requirement as x86, where you have to attempt to decode a 32-bit instruction every 16-bits (because there is no alignment guarantee for 32-bit instructions), and then cancel out the invalid ones. It's not quite a bad as x86, you only need to look at two bits, but it still forms a long dependency chain, and probably requires at least one extra decode stage with complex routing to pick out all the valid instructions.
So not nothing, but very far from a deal breaker even for wide 8, 10, or even 12 wide cores.
YESSSS.
I've been pointing this out for years and years.
By the point that you're looking at the same propagation delay as a common 64 bit adder you're decoding 64 chunks of 16 bits per cycle. That's 128 bytes, or a 32-64 instructions wide decoder.
That is so much wider than anyone is making or contemplating — or that even makes sense given the size of basic blocks — that it's just a non-issue.
So you either need (almost) double the number of full decoders, or a length decode and a bunch of shifters to get each decoder the right input bits (which get larger the wider the front end is. The 8th instruction can be at one of 7 possible offsets)
I suspect a design with a full decoder every 16-bits might actually win on everything but gate count, mostly because it can deal with variable length instructions and variable number of μops per instruction in the same step. A decoder that doesn't output a μop because it was clobbered by a previous instruction, can be handled the same was as a decoder that didn't output a μop because of μop fusion.
Actually, that approach might actually eliminate the need for the extra pipeline stage (just at the cost of gates).
It's certainly not a deal breaker. But it's a valid criticism of the ISA.
And for better than aarch64 density, it seems to make a lot of sense.
I'm not even sure you have a point with regards to it being a valid criticism. Doubling the silicon area for instruction decoding probably costs nothing, because if you have a simple decompression stage, the maximum number of decoders is already doubled in the first place, because you're hypothetically encoding twice as many instructions to begin with. If you can double the decoders in the decompression stage, you can probably get rid of a separate decoding stage altogether and thereby reduce the cost to literally nothing.
Look, it might not be obvious but in university I once had to design an ASIP and then do the floor plan with Cadence and the area of the SRAM dwarfed everything to the point where my ASIP was a tiny vertical column in-between two SRAM chips. I personally was shocked by the fact that I struggled to even find my ASIP on the floor plan, because it was maybe ten standard cells wide in-between the SRAM blocks. Like, ridiculously tiny to the point where it is hard for me to even care about the area the ASIP took up.
Well. May's law[0], which states that:
Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law.
Humans are resourceful, after all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...
And the M5 doesn't have 500B transistors. We're well into the beginning of the ossification. Hell, it arguably started ~2006 with the end of dennard scaling leaving us with Tomasulo OoO cores being the design that makes the most sense for application cores, just getting wider over time as we get more gates.
Insane take given all the things that run on Linux...
Also, have you used Windows recently?
You do realize that Linux got basic SMP support 3 years after NT, and it was shaky for a while after? It still does not have reliable sleep-wake. And it only added native async file i/o in 2019, while NT has had it on the same hardware since 1993? So.. i'll expect an in-order core with an IPC south of 0.5 that cannot exit low power sleep 30% of the time in a decade or so.
Linux started about three years after NT did. And NT could only support 64 processors for a long time when Linux could support thousands.
> It still does not have reliable sleep-wake.
Neither does NT really. Both depend on ACPI for the systems you're talking about, and it's the platform interface that's ultimately fucked.
> And it only added native async file i/o in 2019, while NT has had it on the same hardware since 1993
And has beaten NT on IO throughput for decades, and even now windows ships with a linux kernel integration because running Linux on a hypervisor is far batter for filesystem ops than running those on NT.
And the new async I/O API was so good that NT adopted it wholesale and didn't even bother changing the name. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...
> So.. i'll expect an in-order core with an IPC south of 0.5 that cannot exit low power sleep 30% of the time in a decade or so.
There are already open source OoO RISC-V cores.
But the point originally isn't to be some Linux fan boy (I've written a decent amount of NT kernel code, and have a lot of respect for NT and the things it did right). It's to point out how the upcoming changes inherent to how chips are made and the latencies between gate count targets will better support open collaboration. And once that's supported properly, open source has a tendency to kind of snowball.
I'm with Jim Keller when he says that in time the fastest CPUs will be RISC-V ones.
I would expect to see RISC-V Android phones (probably initially out of China, despite ARM China) within the next few years. They've been busy bees since RVA23 was ratified with a bunch of Chinese companies making changes to optimize AOSP for RVA23. I've also heard on the grapevine that NT already has a RISC-V port internally, but take that with whatever grain of salt you feel like. But Microsoft has already been contributing to the RISC-V specs (they contributed to Ztso for instance).
They did that with x86 and Arm half a decade before any announcement about a switch, not to mention a number of other ISAs that didn't make it to shipping (e.g. M88k) and probably ones that word has never leaked about. IA64, anyone?
They're too large and rich and risk-averse to *not* do it.
I could of course be wrong but I think the publicly known history sets the pattern pretty reliably for the speculation.
I was excited when I heard about the project just after it started. However, past experiences taught me to wait before getting excited about the new 'shiny thing'. I did it differently with RISCV. I waited. I am glad I did. It took a long time for actual silicon to appear. Also, the silicon today has all the facepalming special cases mentioned in the article. Its almost like those old soviet era cpus that had the list of bad instructions handwritten on the package.
Overall, RISCV was a minor spin on MIPS, but without really learning from other processors.
So why is everyone still pushing for it? It has the words 'open' on it. People pattern match on that marketing.
As part of that marketing, they also pushed this attitude from the project... 'RISC won'. I think Chester Lam said it best when he wrote his essay stating that RISC didn't win... OoO archs won. I couldn't articulate that nearly as well as he did. If you haven't read it, I recommend it.
So, yeah, here we are. Many people will follow the bandwagon, but they will find that RISCV will not make a significant difference.
I am glad we still have Arm (in all its many forms), x86, and others. (btw, despite my username, I don't think x86 is the best either :-)
Also, if you aren't trying to ship a product, you can experiment with ISAs on an fpga. Yes, fpgas are a lot slower, but they are also a lot more fun. Especially with the great work done to create open source toolchains. Heck, if you are really serious (slighly crazy), you can build your own chip. For the foreseeable future ASIC shuttles are available at prices under $10k. (again, you have to be a little crazy)
[1] Not because of often-called "risc like" microcode engine, but because the most complex addressing mode on x86 usually decodes two microinstructions, and decodes in single cycle. In comparison VAX needed separate pipeline for instruction decoding.
What a lovely euphemism.
Signed: someone slightly crazy.
The meme joke about standards is sadly relevant for riscv. =3
For RV, a litany of standardized modules creates a system where each capability that the module provides will have a standard interface. No manufacturer is forced to invent extensions bespoke to their implementation, but they’re not forced to support everything the most powerful models do either.
Just my two cents.
Maybe Gentoo could tame that level of chaos... or people just buy ARM64 again knowing the software ecosystem already works. =3