People should zoom right out and think about the whole RISC-V project.
When our phones have billions of transistors, are we seriously supposed to believe that RISC philosophy still matters.
Personally I greatly prefer the user programmable 68000 family of processors.
The marketing of RISC-V is perhaps the most impressive thing about it.
Each to their own, I can see why giant SSD manufacturers want to use a license free design and share the cost of compiler development.
Is there really anything else?
I loved the 68k. It was what got me started with Assembly. But one of the key reasons I have an interest in RISC-V today is for its educational potential. I know how x86 killed my interest in assembly coding. ARM honestly isn't all that much better.
RISC-V gives people a way to learn and understand what a modern CPU is like. Remember Donald Knuth's books. He teaches algorithms on an imaginary CPU. As CISC architecture got superseded by RISC, he started using an imaginary RISC CPU in teaching.
His point is that people implementing stuff need to have some sense of how the hardware works to understand tradeoffs. RISC-V is in my view a great CPU arch to give that kind of understanding for somebody who is not necessarily interested in writing assemblers, compilers or what not.
Beyond that RISC-V really fits well with the heterogenous computing trend we are moving towards where specialized hardware is increasingly doing more and more of our tasks. I would say it is and advantage that these different specialized chips have some commonality between them. RISC-V is giving people a way of creating a whole ecosystem of chips for a variety of purpose which share a lot of instructions, debuggers, profilers, compilers and other tools.
There is no way x86 could be part of that revolution. x86 is stuck as a general purpose CPU. RISC-V on the other hand will power desktop computers, smart phones, micro-controllers, AI accelerator cards, super-computers and just about anything.
> When our phones have billions of transistors, are we seriously supposed to believe that RISC philosophy still matters.
The point isn't just saving gates because it's cheaper. Less gates means less critical path length, meaning less power consumption, and/or higher overall performance when compared apples to apples.
Yeah, absolutely. Personally, when I zoom out, and look at the trends of engineering in general: simpler modular systems that compose well together vs bespoke solutions, RISC-V precisely follows the trend. Reduce global state. Make it easier (for humans and algos) to reason about control flow. Have a simple core with optional extensions. This all makes building multi-core solutions way simpler. We are fast running out of transistor density improvements. But we are getting way better at building coprocessors. There's clear value in "doing more simple things in parallel".
Back in the day I joined evening classes just to get access to the technical college library. Reading books was a thing then.
I do see some value in erasing human history and starting again.
We have been so comprehensively vile to each other it might be better to erase it all.
If anyone was serious about democracy they would give tax payers the option to select the services they are willing to pay towards.
Tick the box to pay towards a new Aircraft Carrier, a new Hospital, Vaccines, Making viruses more deadly etc.
Direct democracy is a bit hard to manage - because people are generally too dumb and can't see the forest for the trees.
That aircraft carrier might be the big weight in a trade negotiation or prevention of a regional conflict which could escalate.
Representative democracy should work better, because you (the voter) judge based on the outcome, and vote, rather than try to understand every possible policy (which is going to overwhelm any individual anyway).
I think the message of They Live; is that our rulers complete lack of empathy for ordinary people means they might as well be aliens.
Also I don't think it was a vision of the future; it was about society at the time.
I think the message of They Live; is that our rulers complete lack of empathy for ordinary people means they might as well be aliens.
I'm more interested in what the movie tells me than in the message the author was trying to convey. If you look at it from the rulers perspective, it will depende on whichever the rulers are. I prefer to look from the perspective of the individual and how propaganda and the need to conform affects my ideas, conscience and behaviour.
If Microsoft were a person; they would be a rich, lucky, lazy, easily distracted person who takes zero pride in their work, content to leave inconsistent garbage littering a product used by hundreds of millions because they are just too bored by the whole thing to bother fixing it.
There was a short story where children were put behind a wall and brought up to believe that magic was real; at some point it started to work for them.
I think the concept has been explored quite widely.
Indicators might be that groups of physicists believe in new tiny particles and then discover them.
Depending on how powerful the effect is; it might have interesting implications.
Consider that despite all the odds we are still here as a species.
For example I sometimes imagine that the world was destroyed by a global atomic war in the 1980s but since we all rejected that bleak reality - we have this current reality instead.
There is a commercial license to help encourage the big well funded customers to pay for the tools they need to compile millions of lines of company confidential ADA.
And a license for only open source software; just in case students or hobbyists want to write their own robust open source rocket guidance system and share it on github.
"Before the end of this decade, the F-35 Lightning will provide the ultimate punch of the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The F-35 is an Anglo-American joint effort, designed by the best and brightest in the two nations’ aircraft industries."
For anyone wondering the UK's new carriers explicitly rejected the traditional CATOBAR approach to take-offs and landings in favour of a design that pretty much requires the F35B STOVL variant.
