have you ever found yourself relaxing in the tub thinking hmm
how could i design my own CPU
okay maybe that's not quite as likely but let's say you work for a large
company that is legitimately looking to do something like that where do you even
start i mean i guess could you license intellectual property
from Intel or ARM i mean maybe but that kind of thing is
going to cost you an ARM and a leg
so then what other options are out there well when we asked just that question to
krista asanovich co-creator of risk five
he was quick to bring over actually like
a team of people and one of these
computers based on risk 5's free
and open architecture which surprisingly
functions like a normal pc
and i cannot wait to tell you guys about this thing
so there's a good chance that right now you're thinking okay
cool tech demo quake 2. but
i'm not going to have one of these open processors in my computer anytime soon
so why should i care well you should care because you
actually can expect to find risk 5 processors in
your gaming rig much sooner than you'd think just
for the time being not as your primary
central processing unit so NVIDIA and western digital along with around 100
other companies will soon be shipping products with risc-5 microprocessors on
board due to it having better efficiency better security and that sweet sweet
royalty-free license to boot in order to appreciate how cool risk 5
actually is though we do need a bit of a history lesson
so back in the 1960s RAM was made using
tiny magnetic cores and these were super
duper slow compared to the vacuum tube processors of the time
so to make sure that the processor wasn't just wasting cycles while the RAM
was catching up every instruction from the memory ran a
little program hardwired inside the
processor called microcode with the 70s
came the space race where scientists figured out how to put a lot of
transistors on one chip which meant that now fast memory could be put on the same
chip as the CPU so then microcode just got
thrown in the garbage bin of history right no just kidding a lot of that same
microcode from way back then actually still exists in modern computers for
software backwards compatibility the legendary Intel 8086 CPU pioneered a
new computer architecture x86
but you could make the argument that it was
just hastily thrown together by Intel engineers in just a few weeks and they
they had no way of knowing that it was going to become the de facto home
computer architecture for decades to come
thanks to its use in the original ibm pc
but with an average of one instruction being added every couple of weeks since
its inception x86 has gone from poorly thought out to
today ballooning to over
1500 instructions i mean think of it like the english language how many words
do you use on a daily basis versus how many are in the dictionary in a modern
world this kind of bloat leads to inefficiency not to mention needless
difficulty for anyone that wants to make a processor so
why is everyone still on x86 well
software support is a big part since porting Windows and all of its programs
to a new architecture has proven
we could use a word like inconvenient i mean look at Windows rt on ARM
total flop on top of that creating a good
architecture in the first place is freaking hard to be clear those guys
that threw it together were pretty talented they were pretty talented team
and it's been a lot easier over the last
several decades to just make the transistor smaller and pack in more of
them at least it was easier until moore's law
kind of petered out and huge leaps forward in CPU speeds
basically stopped in the last five or so years
so clearly a more usable alternative to x86 or ARM was needed one that was
created with modern processors in mind and using the power of hindsight
that other architectures didn't get to benefit from which is where krista and
his team come in creating the reduced instruction set computing five or
risk 5. the core of which has less than
50 instructions instead of 1500ish there
will probably be more by the time this video is out now those 50 instructions
are locked down and won't be changing in the future so ideally a program made
60 years from now using risk five should work just fine on processors
being made today i mean slowly though
but what if those 50 instructions aren't enough
well risk five is customizable meaning that if say
NVIDIA wants to create a processor that is specialized for ai and graphics they
could actually add extra instructions for their task allowing for greater
hardware specialization and much greater efficiency
but of course there have been open source instruction sets before and they
have never taken off so
back to that question why do we care about this one well the
members list for the risk five foundation is kind of a who's who of the
biggest tech companies including but not limited to google samsung NVIDIA tesla
ibm and a hundred or so more including a startup founded by the creators of risk
five sci five to help kick start risk five
adoption and to avoid that chicken and egg problem with hardware and software
by creating the world's first commercial risk 5 silicon
so this right here is the fu540
which stands for freedom unleashed 540
definitely not what else fu could mean
towards lock down standards so so this
one thousand dollar processor is well
not particularly fast with four cores that on this particular board can clock
up to 1.6 gigahertz on a 28 nanometer process node
but breaking speed records is not exactly the point when this processor
was announced with support for Linux back in february you could run pretty
much nothing on it but here we are just six months later
and 80 of the debian software library has been compiled for risk five meaning
that all you need to install almost any app is a quick app get command
but of course the point of this board isn't for you to run games on it even if
it does run quake 2 thanks to this configuration
so we've got the processor here which sits under this
tiny little heat sink and fan then we've got the RAM so that's eight gigs of ddr4
with ecc we've got gigabit Ethernet right here we've got usb and uh let's
see yeah we've got a micro sd card reader right here
but what makes it unique
is this chip connector right here
this allows for you to connect the CPU to
well anything you'd like so
currently on the table in front of me here we've got another unit that's
connected to an fpga that handles pci
express lanes for what you could kind of consider a a larger scale motherboard
here so now we've got a graphics card
this is just a regular hd 6450 AMD
graphics card we've got a samsung m.2 drive on the other side plus
we've got a bunch more i o but you know what else you could connect
here pretty much anything
this allows companies to build whatever custom solution they would like onto the
sci-5 processor board so the tldr is
that it can interface with whatever fpga
or custom silicon is needed while getting the advantages of the risc-5
instruction set Linux support and also
all of the intellectual property and legal work that sci-fi has already put
in to make sure that things like the RAM work with the CPU
so in the future sci-fi is looking to have sort of a domino's pizza approach
to custom chips where a company can come in and add on bits for say image
processing or autonomous car ai but now you're probably wondering
why have it open source then if sci-5 is sinking all this time into making these
custom chips work and into the risk 5 instruction set
why not lock it down so they can keep all the money
well say that a company has a driver issue normally they would have to go to
Intel or whoever to get it fixed causing a lot of work on both sides and
potentially making the company have to disclose what exactly they're working on
whereas when the software and the hardware is open source the company can
just fix the bug and then upload a fix for the community afterwards the open
source nature is also appealing to companies because if they invest in
developing for risk five and sci five goes under
then all of those man hours don't get wasted
what's going to cause the real stiction of risk five though is in education
because it's royalty free the most popular computer architecture textbooks
being published right now and courses being taught in undergrad and graduate
programs around the world use risk 5 to show students how computer
hardware works on a very low level
previously some fantasy architecture would have to be
used and then when a computer engineer would enter the field they'd finally get
to work with a messy proprietary isa
so since very few students will switch up what architecture they use once
entering the field the idea here is that you can expect a lot more custom
hardware being made using risk 5 in the future in your hard drives in your
graphics cards in your cars and maybe
maybe someday even as the primary architecture of your home computer
and you'd be running games more complex than quake 2 by that time so thanks for
watching guys if this video sucked
um hi AMD and Intel
and ARM i guess hi guys uh but if you
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