There's really a lot of severely misinformed opinion there.
"Much of the hype of RISC-V is hoping for laptop/desktop/server class silicon."
Really? RISC-V is pitched mostly against the likes of ARM, which seems to be doing fine without laptop/desktop/server class silicon.
Several RISC-V vendors are already shipping Cortex A53/A55 class CPUs, which are used as the LITTLE cores in mobile devices -- and even still the main cores in lower end mobile. Several RISC-V vendors have formally announced A72 (SiFive U84) or A73 (Alibaba C910) class cores. Alibaba is apparently using these internally already, and boards for general sale are expected this year. SiFive's U84 will probably be shipping in around 12 months from now.
ARM is a few steps ahead with A75 and A76, but those are just incremental developments and RISC-V is catching up fast.
It seems the article was written before the HiFive Unmatched was announced -- but I don't think it was written before the U74 CPU cores in the Unmatched were announced in October 2018, so I guess the author either wasn't paying attention, or else don't understand the standard 2 to 2.5 years from announcement of a core to shipping products using an SoC with that core. There is nothing surprising about the HiFive Unmatched.
Was the article also written before Apple announced its switch to ARM64 architecture and their M1 chip?
The M1 uses ARM's 64 bit instruction set, but is far ahead of anything from ARM or its other licencees in performance.
If someone made the same level of investment in a RISC-V core and SoC as in the M1 then that RISC-V product would perform basically the same as the M1. That's a several billion dollar investment. Apple has that kind of money, but the best known RISC-V vendors such as SiFive (total funding to date under $200 million) don't.
That's an economic problem to solve, not a problem with the RISC-V ISA.
Alibaba or Huawei might well make that kind of investment in RISC-V. They are definitely both very interested in it.
The article concludes with the same old links to uninformed people making uninformed criticisms of RISC-V. I don't know who erincandescent is other than having written this rather famous post. Apparent the credibility of the post lies in them being an ARM engineer. Could be. ARM has thousands of engineers.
Here's the opinion of probably THE most important ARM engineer of the 1990s and 2000s, Dave Jaggar who developed the ARM7TDMI, Thumb, Thumb2.
Check at 51:30 where he says "I would Google RISC-V and find out all about it. They've done a fine instruction set, a fine job [...] it's the state of the art now for 32-bit general purpose instruction sets. And it's got the 16-bit compressed stuff. So, yeah, learning about that, you're learning from the best."
"Much of the hype of RISC-V is hoping for laptop/desktop/server class silicon."
Really? RISC-V is pitched mostly against the likes of ARM, which seems to be doing fine without laptop/desktop/server class silicon.
Several RISC-V vendors are already shipping Cortex A53/A55 class CPUs, which are used as the LITTLE cores in mobile devices -- and even still the main cores in lower end mobile. Several RISC-V vendors have formally announced A72 (SiFive U84) or A73 (Alibaba C910) class cores. Alibaba is apparently using these internally already, and boards for general sale are expected this year. SiFive's U84 will probably be shipping in around 12 months from now.
ARM is a few steps ahead with A75 and A76, but those are just incremental developments and RISC-V is catching up fast.
It seems the article was written before the HiFive Unmatched was announced -- but I don't think it was written before the U74 CPU cores in the Unmatched were announced in October 2018, so I guess the author either wasn't paying attention, or else don't understand the standard 2 to 2.5 years from announcement of a core to shipping products using an SoC with that core. There is nothing surprising about the HiFive Unmatched.
Was the article also written before Apple announced its switch to ARM64 architecture and their M1 chip?
The M1 uses ARM's 64 bit instruction set, but is far ahead of anything from ARM or its other licencees in performance.
If someone made the same level of investment in a RISC-V core and SoC as in the M1 then that RISC-V product would perform basically the same as the M1. That's a several billion dollar investment. Apple has that kind of money, but the best known RISC-V vendors such as SiFive (total funding to date under $200 million) don't.
That's an economic problem to solve, not a problem with the RISC-V ISA.
Alibaba or Huawei might well make that kind of investment in RISC-V. They are definitely both very interested in it.
The article concludes with the same old links to uninformed people making uninformed criticisms of RISC-V. I don't know who erincandescent is other than having written this rather famous post. Apparent the credibility of the post lies in them being an ARM engineer. Could be. ARM has thousands of engineers.
Here's the opinion of probably THE most important ARM engineer of the 1990s and 2000s, Dave Jaggar who developed the ARM7TDMI, Thumb, Thumb2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6sh097Dk5k
Check at 51:30 where he says "I would Google RISC-V and find out all about it. They've done a fine instruction set, a fine job [...] it's the state of the art now for 32-bit general purpose instruction sets. And it's got the 16-bit compressed stuff. So, yeah, learning about that, you're learning from the best."