On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 20:59:47 -0500 zap zapper@disroot.org wrote:
Isn't Risc-V supposedly supposed to be more secure and isn't open power based on the old risc? I am just wondering, if the level of evils risc-v has done, justifies abandoning usage of it when you could just as easily do some risc-v processors with or without their help
The ISA has nothing to do with security. All the meltdown/spectre stuff is implementation, hence why AMD is unaffected by much of it.
and moreover, power, doesn't it require an immense, even crazy amount of watts? I guess my point is, they use more battery power than intel even. And intel is bad enough.
The old Mac laptops basically tried to use a desktop cpu on mobile, kinda what Intel P4 did. It's about design choices, not the instructions. There are a number of lower-wattage Power cpus; using that does not mean the chip will burn lots.
The POWER9 chips IBM offers, 90W for 4-core, 160W for 8-core and 190W for more, they are server chips. Compare to Epycs and Xeons, not to mobile 15W ones. The older Power core in the Wii U uses around 20W. All about choices.
Okay, well you did say openpower, what is that?
IBM released the ISA under open terms, and started the OpenPower foundation to govern it.
Oh really? That's odd... hmm... so you have to abandon risc-v you are saying? Pity that's your only option. I wonder if I should tell others about this.
Just making sure it's clear, the ISA choice is about licensing and extensibility. Risc-v, mips, power are about equal in other ways; in some ways, power and mips are better, like existing compiler support. IOW dropping risc-v is not a loss in ways most users would care about.
- Lauri