RISC-V

[UCFBS]

Bit of a sensationalist headline, but Intel is partnering with various Academia and even some industry to hedge its bets.

Will Intel abandon x86 for RISC-V for its next-gen supercomputing chips?

Intel partners with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre to build RISC-V chips for HPC

www.techradar.com

After selling off its Digital X-Scale/StrongARM in the mid '00s, after Atom was never performant (not in-line, and definitely not superscalar) versus ARM (or even i-Core in low-power states), Intel re-licensed ARM in the early '10s as well.

But more and more it looks like as I said a half-dozen years ago ...

• ARMv8+ will slowly replace x86-64 in consoles, desktops even workstations in the '20s
  • It already overtook the server at the end of the '10s, not just portables, all while ...
• RISC-V will slowly replace ARMv8+ in the portables and ASIC solutions in the '20s
  • It's clearly more scalable, focuses on response time over throughput, and makes a leaner, faster, better controller for ASICs
  • Possibly better than ARMv4+ for even GPU/vector controllers, hence ... supercomputers as its first, killer (better than ARMv8) app?

It's funny how Stanford MIPS has all but died off -- after almost becoming the universal standard by 1990 -- but Berkeley RISC is still going, despite the SPARC dying off a slow death like VAX.