 What I wanted to do for this talk, when I put up the proposals, I wanted to level set to the extent that I can about this whole thing about ISA, about RISC 5. There was so much stuff floating around, there was a lot of confusion as to what on earth is that supposed to be, and why do I care. The terms that were used was, oh it's open source CPU, no, oh you can do whatever you want. Yes, however, what is it that you can actually do? Can you build a chip? Not necessarily because you don't have the capability. So what I wanted to do is to find a way to have a session, so my intention behind this talk is not directed at this audience, it's for a future audience who may be watching online at some point in time, wondering what on earth is a CPU, and so on. So I'll be talking about stuff in here so that hopefully it's useful that my grandkids at some point in the future they understand how he talks about this, so there'll be grandfather jokes as well. Alright, so that's the topic. So first part, first I want to acknowledge this gentleman, he passed away last month, Gordon Moore, you know Gordon Moore, a lot of he was 94 years old, and I think one of the things he said in 2008 was that all I was trying to do was to get that message across that by putting more and more stuff on a chip, we're going to make all electronics cheaper. I think that part continues to be true, but the question is what is it that I can put in a chip that can also make things different? He doesn't talk about that, which is fine, I mean that was not his intent, but this is actually very telling because this is nearly where we are today, looking all the $1 ESP, 82 chips from S Expressive, I mean you can do Wi-Fi, you can do all kinds of amazing stuff, so there's a lot of capability in, and so what he said was true, so thank you to Gordon for the insight in 1965. All right, so with that, let me just move ahead to this slide, anybody know what that is? Diminishing returns. Diminishing returns, okay, I like that. Any more? Any more suggestions? Okay, that's it. Anything else? If you are an economist, when you see this, you probably understand what that is. S-curve, exactly. It's an S-curve, smart guy. So what is an S-curve and why do I care? Because he looks like an S, so that's why I care, but more importantly, is this one. This is from Clayton Christiansen's book in 2000, whatever it was. Anyway, he's talking about S-curve as defining how technology adoption happens over a long period of time. So I will then take that thought process and translate to where we are today from a chip perspective. So the bottom dark, the one that says first technology, the first S-curve, I would say are things like the main frame computers, then subsequently, probably, and I would include chips from Intel, from 6502 chip that was in the original Apple and 6800 and all those guys at that lower level. So these were the early CPUs that started a trend in terms of all kinds of innovation that was happening. And it continues, it doesn't mean just because the first S ends at the top that it dies, not necessarily, it can still be there today. It doesn't mean it expires. It may be less users being deployed to, but it is there. The second S-curve from my perspective for the purpose of this talk is the ARM CPU. So when we were looking at Intel and AMD CPUs as the stuff that ran on our computers, there was no way those devices that were ever going, those CPUs were ever going to be running in a mobile phone. I mean they did try. It's not that they didn't try. I know Intel did try, but somehow they just didn't get that. And in came ARM. And today, there are more ARM devices out there than there are Intel devices on a regular basis, which is phenomenal. It doesn't mean Intel is dead. So I'm now suggesting that the third technology is where risk five is going to come in. So it will be a combination of in the larger ecosystem, globally, there will be risk five CPUs in all kinds of places where ARM cannot possibly be. It may be there today, but they will be displaced. Intel is probably never going to show up. And AMD, whatever. And whoever else left. I'm not sure who else is left. But the important thing here is that that none of those previous technologies are necessarily going to disappear. They will kind of probably retreat or find a new life in a specific niche area where everything else will be covered and done by risk five. That's my prediction. Okay. We can hold me to it and come back here five years from now and see where we are. And it's recorded. So by the end of this talk, I want you to understand what is the CPU? Okay. What are SOCs? And how one instruction set architecture is making waves? I'll try and do this. I only got 20 minutes. I got a lot of slides. So part three. So what is the CPU? We all know what a CPU is. But for those people who are watching this from the future, a CPU is a piece of silicon somewhere. Currently, it's still on silicon. That's not likely to be a biological CPU yet. But for now, that's what it is. And it's got circuits in there that can be manipulated electrically to create some output. Whatever the output is, you decide whatever it is. And then the ability is to do so is by a software that manipulates the signals that goes through and propagated through the CPU. And we always use the term that the CPU is the brain of the computer. I put it in quotes because yeah, maybe it's a brain, maybe it's not, maybe it's a shared brain, I don't know. But let's let's for ease of thinking through, let's consider that as the brain that will work with the rest of the silicon on the board, motherboard or wherever, or even on the same chip to do something, whatever the something may be. So historically, where have we, where have we come from? Okay, the earliest ones, anybody here have a any device at home that has got a vacuum tube? Anybody else? I didn't say functioning as they have a device with back to functioning is the secondary question. It's a nice piece to be put on the shelf, right? Yes, that's that's fine. I mean, it's an interesting thing. If nothing else, it generates heat if you turn it on. So it's a good heat, right? If we were not that we need heat, but in case you think about it, all of those shrunk into a transistor, and all of that transistors shrunk into a microcontroller, not a silicon base on a chip. Okay, so the transition was traumatic. And yet, okay, if you want to think of it differently, these are three different curves, three different escles, they are still around, they're not disappearing, but they have narrowed and regressed into not regressed. They've picked a space that they work best in. So you find a lot of vacuum tubes in high end audio stuff. And maybe some radar stuff, I don't know, some others. So if you go talk to the military, I think that's where they, they like this. So there is a space for that. There's a space for that. So what do we have here? computers are made of silicon chips early days. We have multiple. So in the early days of computers, I mean, even today, these devices, if you open it up, you see on a motherboard, there'll be one big chip, perhaps, and a few bunch of other chips to do whatever else that needs to be done. Things like video encoding, storing files, data into a disk. All of these things are still current and valid today. But if you opened up your mobile phone today, how many of those discrete chips are there? Increasingly, you find fewer and fewer and fewer. If you look at a Raspberry Pi, how many does it have? Yeah, very, very few. A lot of it has been integrated. What does integration here mean? It means putting stuff on a system on chip. Okay, so that's so the work that needs to be done to interconnect all of this is now going into the into one chip. So the question I have here is, can all of these discrete components we put into one? The answer obviously is yes. And this is an example of what a typical SOC looks like a system on chip. So in this particular case, this is from from from Cyprus. Okay, so it has got an arm CPU here. They are embedding an arm CPU. They have some operate off cams here. They have I don't know what else they have. So it's the USB somewhere. Serial wire debug and bus. Yeah, and bus USB to now all of these things are individual circuits that previously had to be put on a different chip on the motherboard. Now you have an all one chip. That's interesting. So now you have a situation where you have one device, everything is in there. And your outputs and inputs are all controlled by the whatever connections you may have. Now, question here is, how many of these discrete well, I call it discrete for now. How many of these discrete components here? Do you have the opportunity to change? You don't. No, you won't have. I mean, sorry, let me rephrase it. You may not have. You can have it if you pay a lot of money. I mean, this money talks, right? So that's not an easy thing to do. Right. So all this just contain many different components. How do you sculpt that to fit what you want to do? One of the things that arm promises. And sometimes actually does deliver reasonably well is low power consumption compared to the others, right? That's one of their claim to pay. But can we make it better? Can you get to arm or Intel or AMD? Can we improve the power consumption? Well, maybe they may be, but you know, it depends on who you are. If you're a state actor, perhaps I have no idea. But who knows, right? But can I with myself? Not with those chipsets. It's not ever going to happen. Okay, so like I said that, you know, for example, if you want to trim some of those things that you saw on the SOC, you may, for example, I know I'm, this one I'm speculating. I have no idea. I don't know the truth behind it. Like Apple's M2 chips, right? They use arm. Now, could they have trimmed some stuff within that? I have no idea to make it perform better in terms of a power consumption perspective. I have no idea. It's possible. If they pay a lot of money. But I don't know, right? So could you do also the same thing with the other components on this? Yeah, maybe, again, it's at a cost. But the challenge here is that you have no control about everything else. You are dependent on whoever it is that has done it for you. So let's then, you know, ask the next question, right? If I can create an SOC, a system on chip that is compliant with standards, whatever the standards may be, that means it's not a proprietary standard. And I can run a standard operating system for whatever purpose you want to run it for. I want to run it from an IoT point. I want to run a camera. I want to do whatever it is I want to do. If I can have an SOC that does that, and to be able to do exactly what you're targeting it for. For example, you may say, I only want to do integer computation and no floating prime because I don't need floating prime. Can I do that? Now in the Intel ARM space, well, just don't use it. Don't use the circuits and the rest of the stuff that is already on chip. I only pay for it. First, second, it is occupying space, probably also consuming power while it is not being used. So you see the the trade-offs are beginning to become a little bit more obvious, right? And I want to have it such that there are no NDAs to sign. I go on an NDA, I got no reuse restrictions. I can just give it to anybody else. Okay, and openly publish the design for others to use. Have you heard that kind of stuff before? Yes. It's called more essential freedoms. Okay, thank you very much. More essential freedom, perfectly fine. That's the FSF model. But that's how open source has functioned. So in the early years, so I cast my mind 30 years ago, 1992, 1993, when Linux was happening, we were wondering, oh, this will never overtake the proprietary operating systems out there. No way is ever going to happen. Who's going to do it? There's a lot of things to do now. 30 years later, where are the others? The only ones that matter are the Linux environments, or maybe the VSD environments as well. The rest, yeah, they are there. Again, it's a niche. It's the S curve. Just think about the S curve. All right. So this becomes very critical. So I can now tear down my Linux kernel to do exactly what I wanted to do for the purpose I wanted for. And I do the same thing with my CPU. That's the question I have to ask. And that's where these guys come in, right? These are just pictures of three, three architectures, right? The three CPUs. What can I do with these two guys on the left? No, it's not going to happen. You take it as it is. Yeah, I'll give you a different model. Okay, this is the other one. No, you don't want this one. I give another model. But can I change the thing inside? No, I'm sorry, you keep it as it is. Or if you have a lot of money, maybe yes. But the last one, hey, do what you want. So if you want to think 1993, you were still around, you were born in 1993, or maybe not, right? So some of you not. For those of us, the dads, who around 1993, we recognize that, hey, there was this ability to change, to change, to tweak, to do stuff, to change and do stuff, which was what was happening then. And people said, no, it's not going to happen. It's not going to succeed. And now I see now into 30 years later, this is beginning to happen in the hardware space going down into the chip itself. That's dramatic. So if you want to get in on the next big wave, this is the time you lost the Intel, you lost the arm. So now next one, okay, the next next S curve, right? So why is RISC-V able to achieve that particular design goal, right? So very quick history, let me just finish this up here. I say, okay, there are a bunch of information there, a bunch of things I'm talking about, but more importantly, is this last one highlighted in red, the instruction set architecture, the ISA, that's what it stands for. The RISC-V is built on, is published open to anyone to use, including removing portions, just like what the free software foundation will love to hear. You can take out, add, do whatever and share it as well. Without seeking permission, the only difference between the FSF model of the four freedoms and the RISC-V is that the RISC-V ISA is in public domain. It belongs to every one of us. So that that rule of the FSF rule doesn't quite apply. It's not on GPL. So you can technically take the stuff, close it up if you want. So if you want to say, hey, I like to create a company since you see this the next wave. Yes. Why don't you start a company that takes this stuff, makes a very, very good, reliable, verified circuit that implements the ISA and make it available for selling to people. You don't have to publish it. You're not obliged to publish it. You can keep it private. So yes, it is not entirely open source in that perspective, but it starts from an open source because it doesn't have the GPL license. It's a public domain. It's good and it's bad. So I will skip some of these things because what I wanted to show here is a fact that RISC is not new. It has been around for a very long time. It was just not understood in the manner that it's available today. So we have the people who created it, David Patterson in 1980 with a RISC one. That was the original one in Burkley. Subsequent, a few other chipsets, you know, whatever they did it. And then the challenge they were facing, this guy's in Burkley was, when you want to teach people check level stuff, it's just like 1993, you teach your operating systems where you're going to get the operating system code. My name is Delinus came out. So that's how you understand how to do the OS. From a chip, how do you do that? So that became an interesting idea to change that dynamic. And so they crafted this thing that eventually was called RISC five. It is pronounced as five, not RISC B. So therefore the question obviously it was was there a RISC one, two, three, four? Yes, there was. But those names were retrofitted to explain the V so that they have to say we did all these four other designs before. So we just labeling it like that, which is fine, right? Just one. Yeah, I think you missed the mips thing. Yeah, I do have the mips. There are many attempts at that idea. But the one that has so far seen more traction is justified. Not the others. Not that the others haven't they had, but they kind of at different stages. And some of them are just thanking and not going very far. Alright, so five. What is ISA? Very quickly? What is ISA? This picture I like, because this explains exactly what we're going to talk about the instruction set architecture. What is this? This is like the dashboard of your car, right? You have all the buttons and the steering wheel and all the good stuff. Every car has similar stuff. But what is inside the car? When you press a button, you turn the steering, what does that actually do? The doing part is that part. The engines, the whatever it is that you need to move. That is the micro architecture. And that's what it's up to you to design. I will tell you, I need to have a button to do this, another button to do that. I want to do an ad. I want to do a multiplication. I need to do a subtraction. I need to store a value. It's what I'm telling you. Go figure out how to do it in circuit. So that's the circuit part. This is the the marketing part. You can put it differently, right? Okay. So when you look at the number of instructions that you have in these three architectures, Intel has in excess of 1300. This has, you know, over 500 instructions in the arm. And respect 47 plus a few more. It takes about six hours to read the document. Would you rather read a document in six hours? Or are you needing two hours? I would add one more line item, the list of publicly known bugs. That's being very unfair to these two guys. But it's a point taken. Yes, I agree. All right. So this is where it comes up to. So in 2015, recognizing that the risk five as an idea was being adopted by a lot of universities and organizations, that Berkley said, Hey, we can't do this ourselves. This is an academic project. So they decided to create an entity called risk five foundation in 2015. And shortly after that, maybe a couple of years later, you know, issues around blocking people's access to stuff. I should not mention the person who wanted to do all those kind of things. They decided they're going to yank it out of the United States. It was established as a nonprofit in the US and moved it to Switzerland and renamed it as risk five international. So risk five international is the custodian of the standard for risk five ISA. And any further development is out of that group in Switzerland. And what they have also done is they have made available opportunities for all of us to be individual members of the risk five organization at no cost. What does that mean? It means you can go ahead and attend talks, events, participate in whatever it is, not that if you're not a member, you cannot, but this gives you a little bit of a leg up to be part of it, which is kind of nice, right? It's kind of nice to be able to do that. So this is interesting. They are well relatively well funded, although it's a nonprofit. The memberships are also open to corporate entities and so on. So that's a different pricing model for that. But the important thing is, they are the custodian of the ISA. So it's never ever going to be closed up. It's going to be publicly available in public domain anyway, but they will keep the traction there. So as I was shown in a previous talk, these are two pages, two A4 size pages, right, back to back of the entire instruction set. You can't see this because I'm going to look it up. It's called the risk five reference card. It's back to back. That's it. Well, there you go. Do you need a lot of the other things? You know, honestly, I mean, I'm, you know, years ago, I didn't look at the Intel stuff and there are a lot of instructions. Do I ever want to use that? I don't need to use it. But you know what? It is in the chip. So it's up to you to use it if you want to use it. I mean, the intent is okay, but I think this doesn't make sense. So how do I identify risk five? I think this is probably the most critical thing here. All the chips that are created under the risk five umbrella starts with RV. Okay, risk five. And then you specify whether it is a 32 bit, 64 bit or 128 bit. Who of the others have a 128 bit CPU? Nobody. Question you may have have asked, why do we need 128 bit? It's just the same thing, you know, yes, of course, I'm, he said 640k was more than enough, right? Yeah, you remember that, right? He told you that. So, so this is the type of chip, the number of bits. Now, you probably think the ultimate soup after that. Okay, so this tells you what is it that I have and I want to use. So if you go down this part here, and it means you have an integer multiplication. A is for farming instructions. F is for single point, single precision voting point and so on. So all these letters. So if you wanted to run a laptop like this with a CPU that can run Linux on it, I need to have a bunch of things. I need to be able to do voting point. I need to do a few things. So what happens here is that a few of these letters are combined together. And there's a specific model called R which is translated from here. The risk five, 64 bit integer m is what I get. f is the integer multiplication, a is for atomic action, f is voting point and d is for double precision. Double precision is the position. So I want to have all of this in order to run an operating system. So instead of having this ultimate soup here, they added just the letter g. So when you are looking to buy a laptop that has got risk five on it, that's all you need to look for. Look for the RB 64g or RB when it happens 128g. That's all you need. Now anything else, why would I want to add the other stuff? Specific use cases. Then I just add those additional stuff and that's it. And a lot of this is going to be compiler defined. So you don't need to put in everything. So the chip may not even have the capability, but that's okay. All right. So part six, show me the code. Now there are some stimulators online. If you want to have a look, this is one of them, which is actually pretty cool. I won't show it now. There's another one at Cornell that actually does the instructions and you can see all the instruction sets, how the thing is working and so on. And the future, I think I want to go to this last one. I want to just close here, right? So I think the biggest problem we have, the challenge is fax. We don't have a way to create the chip itself. And I think somebody was showing somebody's homebrew chip, a fab system. It's not easy for us to do it. So that's the next stage of innovation we need to see make happen as well. Okay. And I would say thank you to Google for trying and offering ability to do a fabrication of code. And I think somebody will be talking about it later. All right. So 128 bit before you know it. Others will be catching up so that's fine. And that's it. So that's my question. Yes. Let's say if I have to horrible. I mean, that shows that the real effort, it's like, like the, you have the picture of the way around, right? But it doesn't produce the other force power because the instrument. So, so, so, so what is the value in just saying I say, like, if the real value of the source of the implementations, like, can I maybe could be answered that? No, I think the question is very legitimate. Why would I want to care? The same question you're going to ask in 1993, you have all these systems running this particular bunch of offering systems move everything that you need. Why do I need another one? There was DOS, there was DRDOS, there was CPM, there was whatever else they came for as to, but where are they today? So the same idea applies. However, will Intel AMD arm open it up for you and me to tear it down to what I needed. That's not going to happen. So that's really the benefit here. So it's an argument to be made both ways. I understand your point. But the question at the end of the day is, would you be able to want to experiment with this and create something more interesting? When because you can, as opposed to the other one, you cannot. Yeah, but when you have all the tools, I see it's heard earlier, all open source tools to do the entire implementation chain all the way down to sending it to the fan. We have all the tools already verification, making sure that you can reuse the service that you have designed. I don't like the phrase that in this industry in that in the semiconductor thing they call an IP. So I have to license the IP from you, which is really a library to do something. So I bring a lot of libraries, right? So the libraries that I want to use, I need to license it from you and so on.