In an interview, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, said that RISC-V development will make the same mistakes that Arm and x86 researchers made years ago. This is because there is a huge gap between hardware and software developers, so much so that it would be a challenge to coordinate the two different teams.
“Even when you’re designing hardware in a more open way, the people who work on hardware are different enough from the people who work on software that there’s a huge gap between Verilog and even the kernel, let alone at higher levels of the stack where you’re working on something that’s so far removed from the hardware that you really have no idea how the hardware works,” he said. “So it’s really hard to work across this huge gap of things and I suspect that hardware designers, some of them have some overlap, but they’ll learn by making mistakes, the same mistakes that have been made before.”
RISC-V is an open ISA standard for processors that is slowly gaining ground, especially in China, where some technology companies are using it to circumvent the sanctions imposed by the United States on the country. Companies such as DeepComputing and Framework have begun developing, manufacturing and selling consumer laptops equipped with these new processors.
But while RISC-V is slowly developing, it’s not yet at the performance level that would allow it to compete with current-generation x86 and Arm processors. It would still take several years or decades of development to run AAA games on a RISC-V chip. But while Arm, which also uses a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, has already gone through intensive development, Linus fears that RISC-V will continue to make the same mistakes.
“They will have the same problems we have at Arm and that x86 had before them,” he says. “It will take a few generations until they say, ‘Oh, we didn’t think of that,’ because they have new people involved.”
But while RISC-V development is expected to make plenty of mistakes, he also said it will be much easier to develop the hardware now. Linus says: “It took a few decades to get to the point where Arm and x86 were competing on a level playing field because there was all this software that was pretty PC-centric and that’s all gone now. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to come along.”
