Before anything else, I just want to say, "neat!" With that out of the way, am I the only one who finds this sort of thing obnoxious: "Featuring a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC with SiFive U74...
Before anything else, I just want to say, "neat!"
With that out of the way, am I the only one who finds this sort of thing obnoxious: "Featuring a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC with SiFive U74 cores..."? Outside of "RISC-V" and "SoC" this seems to be just an impenetrable wall of marketing wank nonsense, and I say this as a guy who's spent the last decade working with computer components. I don't track the various design houses like sports teams, so almost none of this signifies jack shit to me. "StarFive" is clearly the chip design house, and "JH7110" is the SoC's model, but I can only guess that "SiFive" is StarFive's wank name for their core architecture, with "U74" being the particular iteration used in this SoC. Does any of it actually carry semantic meaning beyond some internal versioning nomenclature? The SoC itself is a quad-core, so why muddy everything with this "SiFive" crap?
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but in my career I've constantly run up against the general public's feeling that computing is some kind of arcane magic that only the initiated priesthood can understand, and shit like this is not helping.
In my last job I was an on-site field technician for a couple of major hardware manufacturers, and my specialization was end-user products, meaning mostly laptops and desktops. I had to go into people's home offices to fix the locus devices of their entire workflow, and it behooved me to explain what I was doing to put them at ease. The very first thing that had to go was the marketing wank. Almost none of it signified anything, and when it did, it usually gave the false impression that something was fundamentally different from what came before instead of iterative, which it almost always is. I'm pretty good at boiling down complex subjects to their more easily understood essences, but most of the time, people would reach a point where they threw up their hands and left the acolyte to his arcane ritual.
That would be fine, except treating computers like black boxes has some pretty nasty consequences. If your machine is simply a box containing the magic, then when the magic stops working for whatever reason you're much more likely to toss the whole thing out and replace it wholesale, even if that's unnecessary and wasteful. This is great for sales figures, but terrible for literally every other aspect of human existence. It takes a lot of energy and collateral damage to extract the raw materials to make these things, and recycling is only so helpful in reducing that cost. It's much more preferable that people understand their devices and keep them running than to be participating in this churn that mostly only benefits the manufacturers and their shareholders.
Maybe this is just another example of my ongoing transition to a crotchety old man from a crotchety young one. I dunno. I would like to hear some thoughts about it though.
I didn’t see this when it came through so forgive the late response. In short, yeah, you kind of are being a crotchety old man. 😜 Really, this is just what CPUs (really, SoCs) outside of intel and...
I didn’t see this when it came through so forgive the late response.
In short, yeah, you kind of are being a crotchety old man. 😜
Really, this is just what CPUs (really, SoCs) outside of intel and AMD are like. The phrase used is basically the same as saying Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 with quad ARM Cortex-A52and quad Cortex-whatever CPU and Mali-whatever GPU. The average person will not even care about what is in it. They will maybe care about the SoC to compare it against when looking at alternative products. But they don’t care about what cores are in it; they just care about benchmarks. Only the hardest of hardcore computer geeks will care about the specific cores inside of it.
The actual distinction of the cores is important in journalism. With intel, you will not find them releasing, for instance, a lineup of chips that could be either Rocket Lake or something much older like Haswell. But using older and cheaper cores are a lot more common in other segments, especially in embedded systems where raw performance is not necessarily the goal.
In other words, the way this is being communicated is trying to be more specific and useful, not to be opaque or misleading.
In any case RISC-V is a lot less stable and mature in general than x64 or ARM and is likely to be this way for a long time. This is very much a product for people who know what they are doing and not meant for people who would buy a computer as a magic blind box.
It turns out, this is actually more interesting (and maybe less annoying?) than you (and I!) suspected. From Framework’s earlier announcement about the DeepComputing partnership: This is the kind...
It turns out, this is actually more interesting (and maybe less annoying?) than you (and I!) suspected. From Framework’s earlier announcement about the DeepComputing partnership:
The DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard uses a JH7110 processor from StarFive which has four U74 RISC-V cores from SiFive. SiFive is the company that developed CPU cores using the RISC-V ISA, StarFive is the processor designer that integrated those CPU cores with other peripherals, DeepComputing created a Mainboard leveraging that processor, and Framework makes laptops that can use the Mainboard.
This is the kind of thing that we don’t see because it’s really only possible with an open ISA. So… that’s cool I think!
Board is out of beta.
https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
Before anything else, I just want to say, "neat!"
With that out of the way, am I the only one who finds this sort of thing obnoxious: "Featuring a RISC-V StarFive JH7110 SoC with SiFive U74 cores..."? Outside of "RISC-V" and "SoC" this seems to be just an impenetrable wall of marketing wank nonsense, and I say this as a guy who's spent the last decade working with computer components. I don't track the various design houses like sports teams, so almost none of this signifies jack shit to me. "StarFive" is clearly the chip design house, and "JH7110" is the SoC's model, but I can only guess that "SiFive" is StarFive's wank name for their core architecture, with "U74" being the particular iteration used in this SoC. Does any of it actually carry semantic meaning beyond some internal versioning nomenclature? The SoC itself is a quad-core, so why muddy everything with this "SiFive" crap?
Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but in my career I've constantly run up against the general public's feeling that computing is some kind of arcane magic that only the initiated priesthood can understand, and shit like this is not helping.
In my last job I was an on-site field technician for a couple of major hardware manufacturers, and my specialization was end-user products, meaning mostly laptops and desktops. I had to go into people's home offices to fix the locus devices of their entire workflow, and it behooved me to explain what I was doing to put them at ease. The very first thing that had to go was the marketing wank. Almost none of it signified anything, and when it did, it usually gave the false impression that something was fundamentally different from what came before instead of iterative, which it almost always is. I'm pretty good at boiling down complex subjects to their more easily understood essences, but most of the time, people would reach a point where they threw up their hands and left the acolyte to his arcane ritual.
That would be fine, except treating computers like black boxes has some pretty nasty consequences. If your machine is simply a box containing the magic, then when the magic stops working for whatever reason you're much more likely to toss the whole thing out and replace it wholesale, even if that's unnecessary and wasteful. This is great for sales figures, but terrible for literally every other aspect of human existence. It takes a lot of energy and collateral damage to extract the raw materials to make these things, and recycling is only so helpful in reducing that cost. It's much more preferable that people understand their devices and keep them running than to be participating in this churn that mostly only benefits the manufacturers and their shareholders.
Maybe this is just another example of my ongoing transition to a crotchety old man from a crotchety young one. I dunno. I would like to hear some thoughts about it though.
I didn’t see this when it came through so forgive the late response.
In short, yeah, you kind of are being a crotchety old man. 😜
Really, this is just what CPUs (really, SoCs) outside of intel and AMD are like. The phrase used is basically the same as saying Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 with quad ARM Cortex-A52and quad Cortex-whatever CPU and Mali-whatever GPU. The average person will not even care about what is in it. They will maybe care about the SoC to compare it against when looking at alternative products. But they don’t care about what cores are in it; they just care about benchmarks. Only the hardest of hardcore computer geeks will care about the specific cores inside of it.
The actual distinction of the cores is important in journalism. With intel, you will not find them releasing, for instance, a lineup of chips that could be either Rocket Lake or something much older like Haswell. But using older and cheaper cores are a lot more common in other segments, especially in embedded systems where raw performance is not necessarily the goal.
In other words, the way this is being communicated is trying to be more specific and useful, not to be opaque or misleading.
In any case RISC-V is a lot less stable and mature in general than x64 or ARM and is likely to be this way for a long time. This is very much a product for people who know what they are doing and not meant for people who would buy a computer as a magic blind box.
It turns out, this is actually more interesting (and maybe less annoying?) than you (and I!) suspected. From Framework’s earlier announcement about the DeepComputing partnership:
This is the kind of thing that we don’t see because it’s really only possible with an open ISA. So… that’s cool I think!
Very cool! But also I still desperately wish they’d make an ARM board. aarch64 is far superior to riscV (today)
That's so cool, I love that third-parties are developing mainboards for Framework laptops.
I just wish Framework was shipping to my country... :(