What does this have to do with anything? You do know that a bunch of American corporations are shipping RISC-V cores, right? Including Jim Keller's current company, Tenstorrent.
I mean, Apple is different from pretty much every other manufacturer here. They collborated in the design of aarch64, and a rumored to own a lot of the base IP themselves which they've cross licensed with ARM. It's very close to AMD:Intel::Apple:ARM when it comes to aarch64. That heavily changes the licensing costs. My point isn't that RISC-V is markedly better, but instead that it's equivalent from a perf achievable from in the same nexus of PPA and NRE effort. So there's no reason for Apple to take the pain of a leap with no real gain, but NRE losses.
I would expect to see RISC-V Android phones (probably initially out of China, despite ARM China) within the next few years. They've been busy bees since RVA23 was ratified with a bunch of Chinese companies making changes to optimize AOSP for RVA23. I've also heard on the grapevine that NT already has a RISC-V port internally, but take that with whatever grain of salt you feel like. But Microsoft has already been contributing to the RISC-V specs (they contributed to Ztso for instance).
There is zero chance that Apple doesn't have MacOS and iOS running on RISC-V in the lab.
They did that with x86 and Arm half a decade before any announcement about a switch, not to mention a number of other ISAs that didn't make it to shipping (e.g. M88k) and probably ones that word has never leaked about. IA64, anyone?
They're too large and rich and risk-averse to *not* do it.
Not me for sure. I have no idea about you. Of household name companies I've only worked at Mozilla and Samsung R&D. And SiFive if you count people in threads such as this.
I could of course be wrong but I think the publicly known history sets the pattern pretty reliably for the speculation.
History is much easier than prediction.
I'm with Jim Keller when he says that in time the fastest CPUs will be RISC-V ones.
If China leapfrogs EUV, this could happen.
What does this have to do with anything? You do know that a bunch of American corporations are shipping RISC-V cores, right? Including Jim Keller's current company, Tenstorrent.
I mean, Apple is different from pretty much every other manufacturer here. They collborated in the design of aarch64, and a rumored to own a lot of the base IP themselves which they've cross licensed with ARM. It's very close to AMD:Intel::Apple:ARM when it comes to aarch64. That heavily changes the licensing costs. My point isn't that RISC-V is markedly better, but instead that it's equivalent from a perf achievable from in the same nexus of PPA and NRE effort. So there's no reason for Apple to take the pain of a leap with no real gain, but NRE losses.
I would expect to see RISC-V Android phones (probably initially out of China, despite ARM China) within the next few years. They've been busy bees since RVA23 was ratified with a bunch of Chinese companies making changes to optimize AOSP for RVA23. I've also heard on the grapevine that NT already has a RISC-V port internally, but take that with whatever grain of salt you feel like. But Microsoft has already been contributing to the RISC-V specs (they contributed to Ztso for instance).
There is zero chance that Apple doesn't have MacOS and iOS running on RISC-V in the lab.
They did that with x86 and Arm half a decade before any announcement about a switch, not to mention a number of other ISAs that didn't make it to shipping (e.g. M88k) and probably ones that word has never leaked about. IA64, anyone?
They're too large and rich and risk-averse to *not* do it.
I do wonder, which of the two of us actually worked for years in Apple’s kernel team? :)
Not me for sure. I have no idea about you. Of household name companies I've only worked at Mozilla and Samsung R&D. And SiFive if you count people in threads such as this.
I could of course be wrong but I think the publicly known history sets the pattern pretty reliably for the speculation.