New RISC-V based CPU destroys M1 Efficiency with Up To 18x better performance per watt

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, atxcyclist said:

Apple themselves already killed-off their own RISC processors once when PowerPC went away in the early 2000's. RISC processors have been around for decades, there were even Sun and other workstations using them back in the day, and yet the computing world moved to CISC (specifically x86/AMD64) hardware for a reason. The only real benefit of a RISC processor is power efficiency for tailored workloads.

For a long while RISC CPUs did out performed CISC ones. They were also the only 64-bit Processors if you needed one. They were also expensive, aside from PowerPC and ARM. And Apple Macs ended up being the PC using a RISC CPU.

 

[RejZoR]

The problem everyone is dismissing when it involves Apple's M1 is the purpose of it. You can make the most power efficient chip with most amazing performance per watt like the above RISC chip, but if it can't do the job well for intent purpose, then it's worthless chip. M1 was specially tailored for Apple's use case in low power devices. And it was tailored particularly for their OS. It was also particularly tailored to have x86 assistant units built into ARM chip so it can run x86 stuff in compatibility mode much more efficiently because they anticipated transition period will require it. And it's actually likely they'll leave it in so that Macs will be able to run Windows apps easier, making them even more viable choice for users in general.

[suicidalfranco]

expected given huami's track record with their huangshan processor

 

https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/huami-s-next-wearable-ai-chip-huangshan-2-scheduled-for-mass-production-in-q4-2020-50-energy-saved-with-faster-atrial-fibrillation-detection-880075794.html

[Drama Lama]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

I don't think RISC-V will be on the desktop

It will but maybe then Desktops are a niche product.

What I am sure about is that RISC-V will replace ARM at some point because it's even more customizable than ARM.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, Drama Lama said:

It will but maybe then Desktops are a niche product.

What I am sure about is that RISC-V will replace ARM at some point because it's even more customizable than ARM.

Aren't half of all computers sold, Desktops? Hardly a niche product.

[bcredeur97]

so not a lot of capacity but extremely efficient? Could certainly see this being used for something like a smart watch. Maybe a low end phone that has a focus on battery life.

[Drama Lama]

1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

Aren't half of all computers sold, Desktops? Hardly a niche product.

I‘m not sure about that but the sales of desktop PCs are declining in favor of smartphones tablets and laptops. Also because more and more things can be done in the cloud there’s less and less the necessity to have a big box because you can do everything with a cloud.

[whm1974]

2 hours ago, Drama Lama said:

I‘m not sure about that but the sales of desktop PCs are declining in favor of smartphones tablets and laptops. Also because more and more things can be done in the cloud there’s less and less the necessity to have a big box because you can do everything with a cloud.

Don't you have to pay extra for accuse to a Cloud?

[Kisai]

29 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

Don't you have to pay extra for accuse to a Cloud?

Keeping things in context:

Stadia and

Microsoft https://www.computerworld.com/article/3596089/microsofts-cloud-pc-plan-for-apple-silicon-and-ios.html

 

Like what's going to happen is the desktop will go away for all but people who actually "require" a desktop. If it can be done on a tablet or phone, then that's probably how it will be done.

[whm1974]

21 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Keeping things in context:

Stadia and

Microsoft https://www.computerworld.com/article/3596089/microsofts-cloud-pc-plan-for-apple-silicon-and-ios.html

 

Like what's going to happen is the desktop will go away for all but people who actually "require" a desktop. If it can be done on a tablet or phone, then that's probably how it will be done.

Just because something can be done on a Table or Phone, doesn't mean it can be done Well...

[Bananasplit_00]

Always happy to see RISC-V move forward, its always looked very promising so seeing results like this makes me excited

[Vishera]

Fraction of the power,fraction of the performance.

[StDragon]

RISC processors are used in firewalls. Will be real interesting if vendors like Fortinet migrate over away from ARM soon (like within a few years).

[whm1974]

How many Cores does this CPU/SoC did Micro Magic say it has? SMT? How many Levels of Cache and how much?

 

Wouldn't all of this factor in Performance per Watt?

[BuckGup]

Putting anything controversial with Apple in the title must exponentially increase your web traffic because damn no it's not going to overtake Apple. Apple has the M1 in peoples hands running programs made for X86 elegantly without having to poke around to make things work. This is really cool don't get me wrong it's just dumb to have such a crazy title for a prototype in a lab

[leadeater]

10 hours ago, StDragon said:

RISC processors are used in firewalls. Will be real interesting if vendors like Fortinet migrate over away from ARM soon (like within a few years).

Only very few Fortigate firewalls use ARM, the lesser models (generally models 100 and below but even that is recent ish, E & F series). The higher end models use x86 CPUs but all the important things are offloaded to custom ASICs (which are not ARM), CP and NP ASICs, even my tiny 60D has hardware offload inbuilt in to the SoC. Can't remember what CPU is in my 600C but it is x86 along with CP8 and NP4 ASICs.

 

These custom ASICs are why hardware performance wise they offer so much more than competing vendors on the market at the same price points as they are commonly pure CPU hardware solutions. Problem is Fortigate firmware sucks so roulette wheel of stability with each update lol.

[LAwLz]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Only very few Fortigate firewalls use ARM, the lesser models (generally models 100 and below but even that is recent ish, E & F series). The higher end models use x86 CPUs but all the important things are offloaded to custom ASICs (which are not ARM), CP and NP ASICs, even my tiny 60D has hardware offload inbuilt in to the SoC. Can't remember what CPU is in my 600C but it is x86 along with CP8 and NP4 ASICs.

 

These custom ASICs are why hardware performance wise they offer so much more than competing vendors on the market at the same price points as they are commonly pure CPU hardware solutions. Problem is Fortigate firmware sucks so roulette wheel of stability with each update lol.

Haven't had stability issues with updated on our Fortigate firewalls but yeah, only a couple of the low end models use ARM CPUs. 

The other use Atom or Xeon chips. 

Same with Cisco firewalls. They also use Intel CPUs. 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Haven't had stability issues with updated on our Fortigate firewalls but yeah

They have a very bad reputation for it and we've had many problems, caused by updates and caused by updates to fix a problem where the update was the recommended fix. Once you find a stable release it's fine, but you really have to do your research before an update otherwise pain could happen. We push our firewalls hard, the campus network ones are each HA 1500D pairs with pretty well every feature utilized and the datacenter HA 3700D pairs have a lot of traffic going through them as each datacenter network security zone must go through the firewall (VDOM per zone) to get to another.

 

We've had the IPS engine go in to a lock state in multiple different ways; 100% CPU for no reason, stop processing traffic entirely, getting stuck so no new sessions can be created etc. Then we've had hundreds of rules just drop when pushing config changes from FortiManager, because why not??? HA sync has broken a few times which requires a reboot of each firewall to fix.

 

Security team has spent hours, days on support sessions with Fortinet engineering support and developers. Still my personal pick of all the firewall vendors but 100% not hassle free, not by a long shot. Competing vendors play this up a lot to be honest.

 

I can see Cisco an the like moving to ARM though, makes sense as they could also create hardware accelerated paths in a custom ARM designs. Brute force with lots of cores and multiple CPUs time is passing when it comes to network traffic processing, throughputs are just getting too high.

[williamcll]

I'll come back to check when they release a geekbench.

 

Though if someone makes a publicly available RISC-V SBC I might give it a try.

[Kroon]

1 hour ago, williamcll said:

Though if someone makes a publicly available RISC-V SBC I might give it a try.

 

 Did't HiFive already have an ITX ready for sale?  HiFive also have RPI like boards that they sell. There is a few other companies that sell RISC-V Single Board Computers.

 

 

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b

[thechinchinsong]

3 hours ago, Kroon said:

 

 Did't HiFive already have an ITX ready for sale?  HiFive also have RPI like boards that they sell. There is a few other companies that sell RISC-V Single Board Computers.

 

 

https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b

The RPI like boards are actually pretty interesting. Considering they're only 60$, they serve a good role in providing people with an accessible entry level RISC-V SBC and to test out the new ISA. I know from an educational standpoint that at least Virginia Tech's computer engineering department and maybe several others are transitioning from teaching MIPS as an introduction architecture to RISC-V in the near future.

Edited December 6, 2020 by thechinchinsong
Add more info

[StDragon]

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

They have a very bad reputation for it and we've had many problems, caused by updates and caused by updates to fix a problem where the update was the recommended fix.

FYI, there is a recommended firmware upgrade path. I've see it where people just blindly update to whatever latest rev and sure enough it causes problems. But I doubt that was your case. Fortigates do have their issues from time to time.

11 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

Security team has spent hours, days on support sessions with Fortinet engineering support and developers. Still my personal pick of all the firewall vendors but 100% not hassle free, not by a long shot. Competing vendors play this up a lot to be honest.

Fortigate is the best next gen firewall for the SMB market relative to say, SonicWALL.

 

If you have enterprise needs, you're probably using Cisco or Palo Alto.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

If you have enterprise needs, you're probably using Cisco or Palo Alto.

Neither of those have the throughput required for us, not without going in to excessively expensive models and we already spent a few million on the Fortigate hardware as it is. Fortinet is 100% enterprise capable and in that market.

 

 

If you actually put stock in Gartner, which I don't really myself.

 

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

FYI, there is a recommended firmware upgrade path. I've see it where people just blindly update to whatever latest rev and sure enough it causes problems. But I doubt that was your case. Fortigates do have their issues from time to time.

It's more than time to time, literally everyone who's had multiple years of experience with Fortigate knows not up update unless you have to because of how crap the updates are and the lack of properly documented issues. But it really doesn't help when you are required to apply an update support tells you to that itself is not stable.

[cj09beira]

On 12/5/2020 at 12:23 AM, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I have a feeling that RISC-V will get the same route ARM did, meaning it would premiere in more tightly integrated packages; stuff that would require lots of battery life out of a small battery. I’d see it maybe going in smart glasses then working it’s way up to smart watches.

 

I don’t think RISC-V will be on desktop for a while, ARM is still going to be the alternative for the time being, but at least there’s movement in this space. I wonder what’s gonna be next after RISC-V...

i see risc-v completely taking over the embedded market which right now is mostly arm, things like low power computers of the arduino, raspberry, teensy, variety  etc will likely move over, mostly due to nvidia and the reduced licensing cost

On 12/5/2020 at 1:01 AM, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

The Raspberry Pi was out and Linux supported ARM for how many years before WoA and Apple Silicon, yet they failed to gather any mainstream attention outside of niche enthusiast groups.

 

Until Apple does for RISC-V what they did for ARM, RISC-V on the desktop won't be as popular as ARM/x86, unless Microsoft is actually competent this time around.

except apple isn't making any big grounds on that front, the use of arm on servers, and embedded pcs had done most of the heavy lifting

[Soppro]

I'll believe this to be a competitor to the M1 when RISC-V along with this product actually becomes available to purchase in a product