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[–] 160 points 5 days ago (36 children)

I always thought that Intel was what kept AMD in place being a cool producer of linux-friendly components, so I pretty much dread the day AMD gets to be free from the shackles of competition.

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  • [–] 90 points 5 days ago (20 children)

    I'm keeping an eye on the RISC-V space. Not far off now... I hope

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  • [–] 50 points 4 days ago (6 children)
  • [–] 36 points 5 days ago (9 children)

    Pretty far off but China has some nice manufacturers...or they would if AI didn't exist.

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  • [–] 38 points 4 days ago (8 children)

    This is generally the problem with ISAs.

    ARM has had decades in the oven, x86 has had almost half a century, while RISC-V manufacturing and ISA development has been generally available only a couple of years.

    The fact is if there isn't a big push by some major vendor - or some nation state, then chances are it'll develop slower than the previously mentioned ISAs.

    From design, to testing, to prefab, to packaging, it's all combined just a single step of the journey to improving yield and performance.

    ARM is unfortunately the current trajectory, with Qualcomm, Apple and now NVIDIA leading the charge - which doesn't bode well, simply because you won't know what the hell the firmware do.

    We could truly use some market disruption in this space and RISC-V, being an open ISA, would be the safest bet for digital sovereignty and user autonomy - but apparently those things are only important on paper.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (7 children)

    Can we make our own RISC-V chips like using FPGAs or something? Or would that be infinitely less robust than anything purpose-built by industry?

    Chinese manufacturers seem to offer plenty of options for RISC-V MCUs and raspberrypi knockoffs, but they seem to be always sold out or they don't ship to my country

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    The ESP32 series have already switched to RISC-V for most models and many other microcontrollers has too. There's not a lot in the laptop/desktop territory but with enough incentives it's gonna happen

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    Oh ya, the C3 and I think the C5. Not sure what the current versions are but if they're in esp32's then I guess that's pretty main stream, just nowhere near a computer processor just yet.

    Are the RISC-V ESP32's cheaper than that ARM ones?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    FPGAs are going to be way more expensive. It's possible, but the cost-to-performance ratio would be abysmal.

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  • [–] 29 points 4 days ago

    Sorry, but AMD stopped pretending to be giving any fucks about the little guy. Lisa has been visiting those Trump AI dinner events. AMD is all in on producing AI hardware first and consumer hardware second.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago (11 children)

    As an European I'm ashamed that we have 0 presence in this market

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    It's okay. Your continent's specialty is cheesemaking. And bread. You guys make good bread.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    Good bread can be had anywhere. Even in your own kitchen. The best bread I ever had was baked under the crudest of conditions with the barest of utensils and then baked on a hot rock heated in a fire.

    Now cheese on the other hand.......

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    Not true. The Netherlands has ASML, sort of a monopoly on the manufacturing of semiconductor machines.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah but no actual semiconductors made here.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    Well yeah because that is a near monopoly in Taiwan with TSMC. It is a supply chain and every part in that chain is just as valuable. There is a serious presence of Europe/The Netherlands in the form of ASML in the chip market. It is one of the bargaining chips of the Dutch government when it deals with the United States.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    At least Arm is British. Their instruction sets keep getting more popular.

    Though I admit, it's a little hard for me to estimate how much of a contribution the Arm intellectual property makes to something like an Apple M5 CPU, or Nvidia Grace CPU.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    The competition has been a boon for us plebe users. And I would expect AMD to continue be Linux friendly if for no other reason it costs them very little to nothing. And they aren't as intertwined with Microsoft as Intel has been for decades.

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