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You can then post your mirror of choice in the post text.
FTFY: by referring to the single source of
truthopinion.
“Everyone” here is a very small amount of people with required knowledge. Not talking about monetary requirement.
Well, no, you’re not going to be etching CPUs into silicon wafers in your basement, but it could massively lower the barrier to entry. Small startup companies being able to design processors that could compete with the likes of Intel and AMD would be a pretty big improvement.
You could learn how to design a RISC-V processor if you really wanted to. You can’t learn how to make an x86 processor that doesn’t infringe on Intel and AMD’s patents.
Says you. Maybe I’ve got a cleanroom and a photolithography machine in my basement!
Well, no, you’re not going to be etching CPUs into silicon wafers in your basement
Well, performance-wise, you cannot beat Intel and AMD at the moment. Then there is ARM, which is strong, especially if power consumption is an issue. And it is closing the gap to the top. Bonus: ARM has a range from simple M0 cores to GHz multiprocessor chips. Where is RISC-V on that scale?
Compare ARM performance: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=✓&q=ARM with RISC-V performance: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?q=RISC-V and you’ll see that RISC-V has a looooong way to go before it can be considered relevant.
RISC-V has it’s place, no question, but don’t expect servers or workstations anytime soon. At least outside China and Russia…
The velocity that RISC-V development is seeing is remarkable. The first commercial ARM processor (ARM1) started design in 1983 and was released in 1985. The first Linux-capable ARM processor was the ARM2, released in 1986. The first 64-bit variant was Armv8-A, released in 2011, with Armv9.6-A in 2024.
RISC-V was first released in 2014 and the stable privileged and unprivileged ISAs were released 2021 and 2019 (including the first stable rv64I), respectively. The first Linux-capable RISC-V processor released was the SiFive Freedom U540, which came out in 2018. The current rv64I variant of RISC-V is at 2.1, released in 2022.
I’m optimistic that RISC-V can and will compete, given its compressed development timeframe and mass adoption in MCUs and coprocessors. The big hurdles really are getting rid of the hardware implementation bugs (ex. failure to correctly implement IEEE754 floats in THead C906 and C910 CPUs), and getting software support and optimizations.
There are several HPC companies iterating towards commercial datacenter deployment, of special note being Tenstorrent, which both has an interesting, novel architecture and Jim Keller (know for AMD K8, AMD64, and Apple M-series) as CTO. They may be able to displace NVIDIA a bit in the DC AI/ML space, which could help to force GPU prices to get more reasonable, which would be nice.
Overall, yeah, rv64 has a good deal of catching up to do but, with the ISA not requiring special, exorbitant licensing, hardware development is moving much faster that expected and may be competitive with ARM in more spaces soon, if they don’t succeed in using governments as an anti-competitive bludgeon.
