On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 1:17 PM, Alexander McLin <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Friday, February 23, 2018 at 11:08:23 AM UTC-5, David K. Storrs wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Alexander McLin <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> As one of those who have been following RISC-V progress for several >>> years and also interested in seeing Racket being ported to that >>> architecture I want to drop a note to let you know you have my support! >>> >> >> As someone who doesn't know a lot about hardware, I'm curious: what >> effect would runningthe new architecture have? Would it enable new >> functionality, provide performance boosts...? >> > > In the near-future, none. > > RISC-V is designed to be an open-source ISA free of any royalties or > licensing concerns whatsoever. The idea is to provide a flexible family of > ISAs which can be combined as needed for one's purposes and any company or > foundry can manufacture RISC-V CPUs without restrictions. RSIC-V's long > term goal is to become a universal ISA anyone can use in contrast to X86 or > ARM which come with hefty licensing fees and restrictions on who can > manufacture chips which makes it difficult for anyone else to innovate in > those spaces. > > As for enabling new functionality, one major goal for RISC-V is to allow > the ISA to be extended in well-defined ways which preserve backward > compatibility but allow innovative features to be enabled for specific > applications. It remains to see how successful that would be. My > expectation is better support for hardware-based security features and > audit of hardware designs by independent parties which is significant given > how the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have highlighted the opaque > nature of the closed-source X86 hardware. > > Once anyone who's interested can at relatively low costs explore the > design space of possible RISC-V hardware, who knows what performance > benefits may become possible. > Cool. Thanks for explaining; it sounds like it could end up being the same sort of transformative thing that Linux has been. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
