>> RISC-V is an instruction set architecture right? What do you mean by it will make CPUs a commodity?
Yep. The spec is publicly available for anyone to use. There are also several instances of CPUs that implement the instruction set available to download and incorporate into your designs at no cost. There are companies selling services to help integrate it into SoC devices and such.
Until now, if you wanted to put a CPU on a chip your choices were basically ARM, MIPS, and a couple others. You had to license the core from someone or pay to license the instruction set. Today you can integrate RISC-V with no royalties to anyone. Everyone can have a CPU on their chip.
In terms of performance, the available designs are already beating ARM in terms of power and area metrics at the same or better benchmark performance (at the low end). The BOOM cores (also available for free) are closing in on the ARM high end performance metrics. I have little doubt that a high end design could match or beat the performance of the best Intel or AMD chip, but that has yet to happen. My point is that it's not only freely available, but that it's also competitive with some of the best out there. That combination should make CPUs a commodity in the near future.
If anyone is still paying for a CPU license in 2020 I think they will have missed the boat.
>> The BOOM cores (also available for free) are closing in on the ARM high end performance metrics. ... match or beat the performance of the best Intel or AMD chip,
How does this happen, when many/most good ideas in cpu design(a mature industry) should be patented by now?
>> How does this happen, when many/most good ideas in cpu design(a mature industry) should be patented by now?
The RISC-V instruction set was designed to be free of any existing patent issues and with no specific implementation in mind. The opcode formats were designed with hardware implementation in mind however (minimizing the number of multiplexers and such). The big ideas in implementation have been around for a long time. Boom is a multiple-issue out of order core, but nothing about it looks particularly novel yet. It could still benefit from result forwarding and some other things, but that's an old concept too. I think lot of patents in processors tend to revolve around things that are specific to the ISA rather than broad concepts. The reason for that is that we've been making computers for 50 years now so many of the major concepts are rather old already.
I may be off base here too. I wouldn't be surprised if things like a micro-op cache are still patented, but I also wouldn't be surprised if that concept is 35 years old either.
It may be that getting top performance does require patented ideas, but I'd be thrilled if Intel or AMD gave it their best shot. It would probably perform better than their x86 offerings on regular code.
Yep. The spec is publicly available for anyone to use. There are also several instances of CPUs that implement the instruction set available to download and incorporate into your designs at no cost. There are companies selling services to help integrate it into SoC devices and such.
Until now, if you wanted to put a CPU on a chip your choices were basically ARM, MIPS, and a couple others. You had to license the core from someone or pay to license the instruction set. Today you can integrate RISC-V with no royalties to anyone. Everyone can have a CPU on their chip.
In terms of performance, the available designs are already beating ARM in terms of power and area metrics at the same or better benchmark performance (at the low end). The BOOM cores (also available for free) are closing in on the ARM high end performance metrics. I have little doubt that a high end design could match or beat the performance of the best Intel or AMD chip, but that has yet to happen. My point is that it's not only freely available, but that it's also competitive with some of the best out there. That combination should make CPUs a commodity in the near future.
If anyone is still paying for a CPU license in 2020 I think they will have missed the boat.