This same point is made in threads discussing how wayland protocol is 16 years "old". I think it's different if the system starts out as a research project rather than a commercial project, because the time until a usable implementation is much greater. For example, I would say that riscv is "newer" than loongISA/loongarch despite being slightly older in a literal sense.
If you look at an arch like x86 or ARM it was designed right before chips were released, and then extended over time. The same goes for the X protocol, it simply extended previous versions.
If you are designing something from the ground up to avoid the inherent problems of an existing system, it is reasonable to take time and research design problems to make sure you don't recreate the same issues (which would defeat the point of the redesign). It doesn't compete on the same time-frame as an extension of an existing system.
I think it’s a bit problematic to say ARM is 30-ish years old. The company is 34 years old but 64 bit Arm (AArch64) which is really very different to its predecessors was announced in 2011 so arguably only 14 years old.
Yes, in a sense. But that is not an apt comparison at all, really.
ISA design is a complex endeavor. Arch64 benefited from multiple factors directly attributable to ARMs prior art, domain knowledge, and market positioning.
There is a huge distinction between a globally recognized and dominant ISA engineering firm coming out with a “new” ISA that their engineers had been prepping for for years, and the effort required to create a novel ISA and ecosystem from scratch.
One is just another day at the office, while the other is a very riscy endeavor that requires amassing the talent, creating incentives, creating an engineering culture, and trying to create a niche in a market that was arguably fully populated by other options. And then, you still have to create an entire family of ISAs to match various specification levels.
“As of June 2019, version 2.2 of the user-space ISA[46] and version 1.11 of the privileged ISA[3] are frozen, permitting software and hardware development to proceed. The user-space ISA, now renamed the Unprivileged ISA, was updated, ratified and frozen as version 20191213”
So, it’s more like 5 years old, compared to ≈40 for 32-bit x86, ≈20 for 64-bit x86.
But even that isn't the true starting gun for anything but basic MCU.. For high performance, it's RVA22. The relevant specs were only ratified in December 2021.
It takes 3 years from IP to chips, and thus we are seeing the first RVA22 chips now.
clicking the link all the text seems to restyle multiple times - the fontsize seems to flash 'bigger' at least twice before settling. looks very unsettling.
Yeah, Yandex do a lot of similar stuff to Google: Maps, Images, Mail, File Storage etc., and referring to them as 'just a search engine' is actually less useful than making the 'Google' comparison.
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