Can they? I thought it was an open ISA without a pushover license like MIT.

as much as i love seeing a company embracing risc-v... why did it have to be qualcomm? they'll just turn it into their own proprietary crap just so they can save money on the arm licenses

The day ARM announced their lawsuit against Qualcomm, I said that Qualcomm would switch to RISC-V on the high-end and I still expect them to do so.

Who wants to invest in home grown chip tech just to be told by ARM that they do not like your strategy or that they are not monetizing it enough? RISC-V offers total control over your tech investment strategy.

Qualcomm has not built out the ecosystem in that market yet. They can switch. And longer term, RISC-V is the clear market leader anyway. It will be the better developed ecosystem.

I would expect Snapdragon to stay ARM, but a new RISC-V family can grow beside it.

Apple is too heavily invested in ARM to switch. But most others designing and deploying their own silicon to desktop or server would be better off without ARM.

And RISC-V is already killing it in microcontrollers, automotive, and healthcare.

The place ARM is most entrenched is mobile. That is going to take longer. But if you look at ARMs licensing business model there, there will be a dozen RISC-V players playing the same game against them. That makes it very hard for ARM in the long run. It will be hard to outrun them all.

I was waiting for this news. Let the games begin.

Agreed, but then government should provide some sort of guarantee that it will be available at least for another ~10 years. Or do so for the next release.

I am hardly suggesting that this chip is competitive but the article is too hard on it.

In particular, this chip inherits the existing RISC-V ecosystem. The article mentions that it runs Linux and it will be well supported by compilers like GCC and Clang. If there is a niche where it fits, this chip could be put to use right away.

There are many, many applications that do not need the most powerful or even the most efficient chips.

Reliability and longevity of supply are often the most important criteria. I notice that the Indian government describes this chip as “reliable”.

At the right price and with a bit of government support, you could build a domestic industry around this thing (or future versions).

Great.
Now make RAM :P

Although dual core 1GHz is pretty good for a lot of things and would be a pretty good thing to use in place of many other expensive alternatives, the power requirements feel like the biggest issue here.
Specially in case of IoT, 5G infra and consumer electronics, where the 2 big problems of battery life and thermal dissipation come up.

In case of 5G infrastructure, where the components are expected to be used continuously and aren't replaced for years, the power consumption (and the extra power consumption on cooling) will easily trump any cost savings, Indian companies might get from cheaper components.
But of course, the broadband providers may happily use those chips in the user-side units, where they are not having to pay the user's electricity bill.

Can only be said for sure after the power consumption details are released.

Hmmm, so I had seen that SOC but it just said RV64GC which I don't think normally includes hypervisor mode...but reading the datasheet it does indeed have it. Thanks for the info

The Milk-V Megrez can be found on AliExpress and has the ESWIN EIC7700X SoC. It lacks the V extension, so it's not RVA23 compliant but is all good for RVA22.

Agreed. They are following the ARM playbook but faster. The success of ARM has made it easier. ARM is just starting to take on the server side and RISC-V is about to enter that space with Tenstorrent, Alibaba, Ventana, and others. Alibaba has a talk on the C930 at the RISC-V summit later this month. Tenstorrent has a talk on Ascalon with “now available” in the title. Akeana has a few talks bragging about performance. There is a suspiciously high number of Qualcomm appearances as well.

Intel could really get squeezed on the server. They have to compete not just with AMD but with both ARM and RISC-V. If you are building out cloud infrastructure that is going to be running end-user Python scripts that wire together AWS web services, who cares what the ISA is?

I think ARM made a big mistake suing Qualcomm over X Elite. If I was a chip maker, I would use RISC-V simply to avoid the risk of ARM trying to block or dictate my business model.

And if you are doing AI at the edge, the regular CPU hardly matters. What advantages do ARM and x86 offer over RISC-V there? If none, an open ISA makes sense. Again, just for the control and lack of legal risk if nothing else.

Eating the market from the bottom up is also the strategy ARM used to get this successful. But then again, x86 stagnating (or nearing EOL, but I won't make predictions about that) will also have contributed significantly to their success in the high-end market.

Presumably they're counting by number of chips (or maybe cores?), in which case this isn't a huge surprise. Nvidia alone is probably a huge fraction of that.

Still impressive though.

Certainly not. But they are eating the market from the bottom up. A lot of that share would have gone to ARM previously.

With RVA23, we are expecting some server class chips in 2026 that will compete with ARM and even Intel. You see Ubuntu positioning themselves for that now.

In the SBC market, we are going to get Pi 5 or better performance next year as well. That puts RISC-V in contention for many use cases. Mid-range phones and tablets should not be far off.

It is not going to be laptops and desktops for a bit but it is probably closer than people think. And once it comes, it is going to move quickly. 2030 maybe? How many non-Apple ARM laptops will have gotten traction by then?

ARM could really get squeezed.

My guess is microcontrollers. Everything has a microcontroller in it these days, it's a huge market and one that doesn't need to worry about stuff like huge ecosystems of existing software that was written for a different architecture

They haven't announced which market that is yet! But, it for sure ain't consumer devices like PCs and handhelds.

The problem is not that Linus does not understand the code

I think it depends on the definition of "understand" in this context. In my example I used the words "does not make sense", but I did not quantify what that meant.

It could be interpreted as making sense in the context of doing things in a way that's acceptable to him.

If that doesn't "make sense" to you either, feel free to insert whatever other wording gets your point across, but I think you understand what I'm trying to say, which is that I think there is still room to be much nicer than Linus currently is, without losing the intended effect, but at the same time also not angering near as many people for (IMO) unnecessary reasons.

it would be better for everyone if we could all be a little bit nicer

I agree with that

personal attacks

I agree, personal attacks are bad

“this code does not make any sense to me”

But here is the problem. Your two versions are not the same. The problem is not that Linus does not understand the code. The issue is that he does.

I believe strongly that high performance culture requires that it be absolutely ok to talk about the quality of an idea or about the work and that this NOT be seen as attacking the person.

“You are an idiot” is not ok. “This code is garbage” has to be (at least from the guy whose job it is to determine code quality). You can say “this code is very low quality” or “this code is totally unacceptable” if you like.

Co-pilots will allow pilots crash planes out of respect. Engineers allow bad designs to crash planes too. Neither of these are preferable to speaking openly and plainly, at least not in my view.

Lives absolutely depend on the Linux kernel. It is ridiculous to say they do not. What do we value more, comfort or safety?

Please be nice. Please also say exactly what you mean. At work at least. Suffering fools gladly is a better strategy at play and at home.

I think it is very possible to speak plainly and even rather assertively without actually devolving into personal attacks and abusive tones, and I don't think it's too much to ask. I would even suggest that it would be better for everyone if we could all just be a little bit nicer.

Example from Linus:

This code is GARBAGE.

A better way to get the same point across:

This code does not make any sense to me.

To each his own.

Personally, I would want to live in a house where someone loudly reacts to somebody suggesting to remove a load-bearing wall for cosmetic reasons. I do not want them to pretend that it is a reasonable suggestion. Speak plainly!

This attitude is exactly why I try to stay away from Linux. Bring on the downvotes, I don't care.

I refuse to separate the art from the artist, which is what boycotting in general really is IMO.

It's like being gifted a haunted house. Technically the house is structurally sound, the design of the house itself is not a problem... but even just being outside around the house makes me feel uneasy. I don't like what happens on the inside OR the outside, and I just prefer to stay away from it.

Um, stop holding back, Linus.