RISC-V: Is it Open Source Hardware? (RISC-V part 1)

hello my name is Gary Sims and this is Garrett explain that a little longest time I wanted to make a video about risk 5 because I think there are some important issues that need to be addressed as important things that need to be explained however I delay doing it because people's comments below my videos another place on these it's so frustrated me about what they were saying about risk 5 but that turned into a kind of a negativity I didn't want to come over in a negative way about risk 5 because if you understand what it is and what it's trying to do it's great but when you try to understand it in the wrong light if you misunderstand it then actually it can be quite frustrating eventually I've made the video because I just had to have a reference material out there that I could point people to when they make inaccurate comment about risk 5 now I made the video and it was 40 minutes long 40 minutes for zero minutes long and I thought to myself no one's gonna want to watch a video 40 minutes long about risk 5 but I have the material so what decides to do is to split it into four separate videos and I'm hoping that because they're kind of ten minutes each long that in these smaller chunks people might be willing to watch them so this first video is called is risk five open-source hardware now once we do this firstly do come back to me at the end of this video I'll tell you about the other three but let's really get into this now so if you want to find out about risk 5 and is it open source hardware please let me explain ok so let's get cracking so really the question is what is risk 5 and is it like Linux for hardware of course the idea is that Linux has brought such a great revolution to software that we use today that if this can be reproduced for hardware then that will radically change the computers that we use over the next few years so what is risk fievel risk 5 is a free and open I saw or instruction set architecture so basically what that means is that when a CPU needs to run its machine code it sees a sequence of ones and zeroes now what do those ones and zeroes mean does that particular pattern mean a load of register from memory or does it mean jump to another place does it mean compare two numbers okay and every instruction set architecture has a different way of treating those different ones is now I have a whole video video on designing your own instruction set architecture here on this channel and I recommend you watch that if you are interested some more now the risk five Foundation has a board directors comprising of seven representatives from some really big companies hey look Google NVIDIA nxp of course University of California Berkeley because that's where of course risk 1 and risk 2 came from and Western Digital so there's some very big names behind risk 5 but we have to ask ourselves the question do we have a lack of Isis have historically is this something that we are missing and of course the answer is no if we go right back to the days of cameo the Commodore 64 or the BBC micro we had the 6502 that was 8-bit if you were as an expectorant fan then you had of course the zilog z80 then going forward of course we had the motorola 68000 and then today of course we have the Intel x86 starting with the 808 6 the 802 8 6 8 of 386 and then of course that went from 32-bit to 64-bit there was alpha from Digital Equipment Corporation deck that was 64-bit there's MIPS which is still around today and we'll talk about that in a moment 32-bit and 64-bit they was Intel's failed attempt at the Itanium 64-bit there's power which is kind of this family that included PowerPC in the past it's used by IBM today in a lot of their mainframes including Zion Watson which of course has been very popular for demonstrating IBM's machine learning capabilities spark that we found in the Sun workstations there was VAX and then of course it is still today arm on 32-bit and 64-bit but you're probably thinking yes but Garry none of those were open source they were all proprietary and that's true in their day there were they were proprietary but today risk five is not the only open-source instruction set architecture non proprietary and royalty-free that spark from all those times with the Sun workstations today it's completely non proprietary rotary in fact the SPARC instruction set is published as an international standard look at that there okay and now with it we talk about MIPS MIPS of course been along around for a long time under wave Computing's mips open program now remember MIPS got bought by wave computing from imagination when imagination I had the whole problem with our Apple dropping their GPUs they sold the mips department over to wave computing and now it's open participants have full access of the most recent 32-bit and 64-bit mips architecture free of charge with no licensing or royalty-free fees so there is another whole kind of historically well-known mature instruction set architecture that is free and then he says 'add interesting when I found j2 which is an implementation of Hitachi super H I sir this processor here j2 is an open process which is royalty free and Payton free under the bsd license so there are lots of alternatives to risk v if people wanted something be truly it was an open and open source instruction set architecture now one of the common misperceptions about risk v is that it's open source hardware and this is the first thing I want to really get us to understand this is from the risk v FAQ from the risk v website if a company built a risk v implementation at me they built a risk v chip is it required to release source code for the risk v core no the source code can be completely closed so this is the first thing you have to understand the license for risk v is very very open in the sense that actually anybody can take that risk v instructions in architecture build a processor and they're under no obligations to tell anybody about what's inside that processor how they built it what's the internals of it they can just license it and sell it and do whatever they want with it exactly like they do with other instructions that architectures and we'll talk more about this in a minute desires are free to develop proprietary or open-source doesn't mean open-source you know people can you know companies can release their source code if they want to for commercial or other uses as they see fit the risk 5 foundation encourages all implementations that are compliant with the specification so there is the option of publishing the internals of your risk 5 recipe it's not an obligation so let's get this straight in our mind if you see a risk 5 processor anywhere in a board in a development situation that doesn't necessarily mean it is an open source hardware solution and then to kind of nail that point home while there are many open source cores listed on the risk 5 website none of them can run Linux ok the only two calls on the risk 5 website that can run Linux are not open source now one of them is from sy v sy 5 is kind of seen as the shining light in the risk v world but it makes its money by designing calls and then licensing them licensing them for money ok to chip makers in the same way other companies like arm and other companies do at the moment so the business practices of sci-fi are exactly the same as other chip designers and chip IP intellectual property designers that we see today another example is Andes technology and this was a press release I read just two days he goes another risk $5 they added 60 licensing agreements for their risk 5 processes during the first half of 2019 60 so these people are doing well they are managing to get 16 now I've got no problem with size 5 being a licensing their designs I got no probably 90 seconds you like that's absolutely fine if they can make money if they can run a bit to make any play people they can keep those engineers happily employed keep their families safe and happy I am delighted but let us understand what it really is this is the same as any other commercial operation they are taking chip designs they are making themselves on their licensing that IP to other people sigh five Handy's technology make most of their money not by using open-source chip designs they are using the open-source risk 5 instructions architecture but their designs themselves they sell for money now there are other calls that are not listed on the risk 5 website and that includes the Indian University from address I think the probably no Klaus is right Shakti processor now that can boot Linux and that is as far as I know completely open-source so here we see the counterpoint between commercial operations like Sai 5 and an anti-technology who are designing and licensing selling the IP to other companies just like people done in the semiconductor industry for decades and a university like this one that is trying to build risk 5 processors from an academic point of view now one of the comments I have read often is that with open source hardware like risk 5 we will know what on the chip so there won't be any backdoors what if a company makes a risk 5 processor that doesn't mean you know what on the chip ok just because something is risk 5 rather than arm or rather than Intel or rather than whatever you don't know what on the chip even if a company releases all the source codes for a chip so there is all the information so that you could build that chip yourself you still don't know what's on the production version there's no way guaranteeing that what they have released and what is on the chip are the same thing why because at some point this chip has to be this design has to be turned into a physical chip ok and that requires a fabrication plan and those cost billions of dollars and you have to make an order and say I want you to start making me this 7 nanometre you know extreme ultraviolet light processed chip please and that cost a lot of money so there is a translation transition from a design to a physical chip and at that point that it becomes a physical chip you don't know what's on there that doesn't mean it won't be what on that we assume that today what's on Intel what on arm what's on AMD what's on all these other chips we assume that what's on there is what they have said is on there but just because it's risk 5 that doesn't change that situation now here's another interesting thing I thought I'd mention is that is it free in the real world is Linux free well the answer is no of course because linus torvalds was paid one point six million dollars in 2016 we don't think we have data for 2017 or 2018 we 2016 it was declared here we see for salary of one point six million dollars me I think he earned every single dollar of it I don't brig Raj him that money at all congratulations and well done Linus but that's a lot of money so you have to remember that when people are talking about risk v and all the free it's all free everything's free well nothing's free people have to eat people have to pay their mortgages people need to be able to buy clothes people have families to support and Linus hear it getting a good salary and and congratulations to him but you know nothing is free okay now Linus started off by doing all as a project and he you know and that was great and it developed into something absolutely amazing but if we want risk v to be something absolutely amazing people and I have to get paid money okay so don't have this idea of it oh it's all free now you might be using Linux for free you might be using you know OpenOffice for free or liberal office for free or whatever you might be using but actually someone paying for it somewhere but they're allowing you to use it without paying anything now let's take for example against I five risk five stars have been announced recently an additional sixty five million dollars in funding some of which this is why it was in the headlines came from Qualcomm and so far is raised one hundred and twenty five million dollars so if you want to build a chip design company then Licensing's risk five chips usually a lot of money and here it's showing one hundred and twenty five million dollars so far and I'm sure that numbers going to go up over time so microcontroller designs which are much simpler and low in even low end you know full-blown processors with an MMU in it in a memory management unit that can do things like a protected memory and run Linux might succeed from universities and even fire open-source community projects but competitive processors cost be money 125 million 1.6 million for liners we are talking big money here so don't have a delusion about how you think that magically they're just going to be these amazing risk fire hoses that compete with Intel and arm and AMD and they all just happen because some guy some girl is doing some hardware hacking in their living room late at night that ain't gonna happen ok so there you have it there's my first video on risk 5 there are three more to follow the next one is about what goes into designing a risk 5 processor including the micro architecture aspects extensions to risk 5 if you could design an SOC then there are things like GPUs and DSPs and other things to incorporate into that the third video is about compliance with the RISC 5 specification and the danger or forking risk 5 and then the fourth video is about my predictions about what will happen to risk 5 over the next few years so this is the first of four videos I really do hope you enjoyed it and I guess I'll see you next one you

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 46,103

Rating: 4.9126048 out of 5

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, RISC-V, open source, open source hardware, ISA, Instruction Set Architecture, CPU

Id: 4qBKOAv0sBI

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019