Summaries this for me “(39746) RISC-V is the future of computing | Chris Lattner and Lex Fridman - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXdx0X2WHfY

Transcript:
(00:03) so maybe let's talk about that a little bit the world of asics and yeah well actually you're uh you're you have a new role at sci-fi what's that place about what is the vision sure uh so for their vision for i would say the future of computer yeah so i lead the engineering product teams at sci-five sci-five is a company who's was founded with this architecture called risk five risk five is a new instruction set instruction sets are the things inside of your computer they tell how to run things
(00:36) um x86 from intel and arm from the arm company and things like this or other instruction sets i've talked to signature up i talked to dave patterson who's super excited about risk five dave dave is awesome yeah he's brilliant yeah the uh risk five is distinguished by not being proprietary and so xa6 can only be made by intel and amd arm can only be made by arm they sell licenses to build arm ships to other companies things like this mips is another instruction set that is owned by the mips company now wave
(01:06) and then it gets licensed out things like that and so risk five is an open standard that anybody can build chips for and so sci-fi was founded by three of the founders of risk five that designed and built it in berkeley working with dave and so that was the the genesis of the company sci-fi today has some of the world's best five cores and we're selling them and that's really great they're going to tons of products it's very exciting so they're taking this uh thing that's open source and just being
(01:35) trying to be or are the best in the world at building these things yeah so here it's the specifications open source it's like saying tcp is an open standard or c is an open standard but then you have to build an implementation of the standard and so cy5 on the one hand pushes forward and defined and pushes forward the standard on the other hand we have implementations that are best in class for different points in the space depending on if you want a really tiny cpu or if you want a really big beefy one that
(02:03) that is faster but it uses more area and things like this what about the actual manufacturer chip so like what yeah so where does that all fit i'm gonna ask a bunch of dumb questions that's okay this is how we learn right and so uh what the way this works is that there's generally a separation of the people who design the circuits and then people who manufacture them and so that you'll hear about fabs like tsmc and samsung and things like this that actually produce the chips but they take a design coming in
(02:33) and that design specifies how um how the you know you turn uh code for the chip into uh little rectangles that then use photo lithography to make uh mask sets and then burn transistors onto a chip or onto a onto silicon rather so and we're talking about mass manufacturing so yeah they're talking about making hundreds of millions of parts and things like that yeah and so the fab handles the volume production things like that but um when you look at this problem um the interesting thing about the space when you look at it is that
(03:09) um these the steps that you go from designing a chip and writing the quote-unquote code for it and things like verilog and languages like that down to what you hand off to the fab is a really well studied really old problem okay um tons of people have worked on it lots of smart people have built systems and tools these tools then have generally gone through acquisitions and so they've ended up at three different major companies that build and sell these tools they're called eda tools like for electronic design automation
(03:39) the problem with this is you have huge amounts of fragmentation you have loose standards and the tools don't really work together so you have tons of duct tape and you have tons of uh lost productivity now these are these are tools for designing so the risk five is a instruction like what is risk five like how deep does it go how how much does it touch the hardware how much does it define how much of the hardware is yeah so risk five is all about um given a cpu so the the the processor and your computer how does the the compiler like the swift
(04:15) compiler the c compiler things like this how does it make it work so it's what is the assembly code and so you write risk 5 assembly instead of x86 assembly for example but it's a set of instructions as opposed to instructions what do you say it tells you how the compiler works well sorry it's what the compiler talks to okay yeah and then uh so the tooling you mentioned that the disparate tools are for what for when you're building a specific chip so wrist five in hardware in hardware yeah so so risk five you can
(04:45) buy a risk five core from sci-fi and say hey i wanna have a certain number of run a certain number of gigahertz i want it to be this big i want to be have these features i won't have like i want floating point or not for example and then what you get is you get a description of a cpu with those characteristics now if you want to make a chip you want to build like an iphone chip or something like that right you have to take both the cpu but then you have to talk to memory you have to have timers ios a gpu other components and so you need to pull
(05:18) all those things together into what's called an asic an application specific integrated circuit so a custom chip and then you take that design and then you have to transform it into something that the fabs like tsmc for example know how to turn take to production got it so but yeah okay and and so that process i will i can't help but see it is is a big compiler okay yeah it's a whole bunch of compilers written without thinking about it through that lens isn't the universe a compiler like compilers do two things they
(05:55) represent things and transform them yeah and so there's a lot of things that end up being compilers yeah but this is this is a space where we're talking about design and usability and the way you think about things the way things compose correctly it matters a lot and so sci-fi is investing a lot into that space and we think there's a lot a lot of benefit that can be made by allowing people to design chips faster get them to market quicker and scale out because um you know at the alleged more end of
(06:23) moore's law you've got this problem of uh you're not getting free performance just by waiting another year for a faster cpu and so you have to find performance in other ways and one of the ways to do that is with custom accelerators and other things in hardware and and so what we'll talk a little bit about uh a little more about asics but uh do you see that a lot of people a lot of companies will try to have like different sets of requirements that this whole process to go for so like like almost different car companies
(06:59) might use different uh and like different uh pc manufacturers like so is this like is risk five um in this whole process is it potentially the future of all computing devices yeah i think that so if you look at risk five and step back from the silicon side of things risk five is an open standard and one of the things that has happened over the course of decades if you look over the long arc of computing somehow became decades old yeah okay so you have companies that come and go and you have instruction sets that come and go
(07:33) like one example of this out of many is uh uh sun was spark yeah some went away spark still lives on at fujitsu but we have hp had this instruction set called pa risk so pa risk was its big server business and had tons of customers they decided to move to this architecture called itanium from intel yeah this didn't work out so well yeah right and so you have this issue of you're making many billion dollar investments on instruction sets that are owned by a company and even companies as big as intel don't
(08:08) always execute as well as they could they have their own issues um hp for example decided that it wasn't in their best interest to continue investing in the space because it was very expensive and so they make technology decisions or prod they make their own business decisions and this means that as a customer what do you do you've sunk all this time all this engineering all the software work all these you've built other products around them and now you're stuck right what risk 5 does is it provides
(08:34) you more optionality in the space because if you buy an implementation of risk 5 from sci five and you should they're the best ones yeah um uh but if something bad happens to sci five in 20 years right well great you can turn around and buy rs5 core from somebody else and there's an ecosystem of people that are all making different risk five cores with different trade-offs which means that if you have more than one requirement if you have a family of products you can probably find something in the wrist five space that
(09:03) fits your needs whereas with if you're talking about xa6 for example it's intel's only going to bother to make certain classes of devices right i see so uh maybe a weird question but like if sci-fi is uh like infinitely successful in the next 20 30 years what does the world look like so like how does the world of computing change so too much diversity and hardware instruction sets i think is bad like we have a lot of people that are using um lots of different instruction sets particularly in the embedded the like
(09:40) very tiny microcontroller space the thing in your toaster um that uh that are just weird and different for historical reasons and so the compilers and the tool chains and the languages on top of them aren't there and so the developers for that software have to use really weird tools because the ecosystem that supports is not big enough so i expect that will change right people will have better tools and better languages better features everywhere that then can service many different points in the space um and i think risk five will progressively
(10:14) um eat more of the ecosystem because it can scale up it can scale down sideways left right it's very flexible and very well considered well-designed instruction set i think when you look at sci-fi of tackling silicon and how people build chips which is a very different space um that's where you say i think we'll see a lot more custom chips and that means that you get much more battery life you get better better tuned solutions for your iot thingy so you get you get people that move faster you get the
(10:47) ability to have faster time to market for example so how many custom so first of all on the iot side of things do you see the number of smart toasters increasing exponentially so and if you do like how much customization per toaster is there do all those in the world run the same uh silicon like the same design or is it different companies have different design like how much how much customization is possible here well a lot of it comes down to cost right right and so the way that chips work is you end up paying by the
(11:24) one one of the factors is the the size of the chip and so what ends up happening just from an economic perspective is there's only so many chips that get made in a year of a given design and so often what customers end up having to do is they end up having to pick up a chip that exists that was built for somebody else so that they can then ship their product and the reason for that is they don't have the volume of the iphone they can't afford to build a custom chip however what that means is they're now
(11:51) buying an off-the-shelf chip that isn't really good isn't a perfect fit for their needs and so they're paying a lot of money for it because they're buying silicon that they're not using well if you now reduce the cost of designing the chip now you get a lot more chips and the more you reduce it the the easier it is to design chips the more the world keeps evolving and we get more ai accelerators we get more other things we get more uh standards to talk to we get 6g right you get you get you get changes in the world
(12:21) that you want to be able to talk to these different things there's more diversity in the cross product of features that people want and that drives differentiated chips in different in another direction and so nobody really knows what the future looks like but um but i think that there's a lot of silicon in the future you
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In this discussion between Chris Lattner and Lex Fridman, Lattner talks about RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), and its potential to shape the future of computing. Unlike proprietary instruction sets like Intel's x86 and ARM, RISC-V is open, allowing anyone to design and build chips using this architecture. SciFive, the company Lattner works for, was founded by creators of RISC-V and is focused on developing high-performance cores based on it.

Lattner explains how RISC-V allows for more flexibility and customization in chip design, making it scalable for various applications, from small IoT devices to powerful processors. He discusses how chip design involves creating a circuit design, which is then manufactured by fabrication companies like TSMC. SciFive is pushing both the open standard of RISC-V and building best-in-class implementations for different needs.

The conversation also touches on how the RISC-V ecosystem allows companies to avoid being locked into proprietary systems, enabling more innovation and a broader range of computing solutions. Lattner sees the future of computing moving towards more specialized and custom chips, driven by specific hardware requirements like AI accelerators and improvements in battery life. This flexibility and openness position RISC-V as a significant force in the future of computing.


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