RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
It’s only a matter of time, x86 is very power hungry and while companies like Microsoft have been slowly adding ARM support, they’re weary of having to rely on expensive proprietary architecture that can pull the rug under hardware companies at any time. Remember when Nvidia tried to buy ARM? Luckily that failed but with RISCV that’s not a concern. The next few years are gonna be pretty good, I can’t wait for reliable riscv laptops that can have good battery life and performance.
It opens the door to more manufacturers since there is no ISA licence fees. While the AMD/Intel duopoly is being fairly competitive at the moment, it really doesn’t have to be. Only think back to how bad it was late 2000s to 2015.
I imagine a plethora of core designers, soc vendors and platform creators filling their own niches; lowest cost, lowest power, HW accelerators, highest core count etc.
I don’t see the raw performance of AMD/Intel being surpassed soon, just because of the sheer total R&D years each has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other areas better suited to a different architectural approach.
It is a movie quote:
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Pretty encouraging progress. Soon RISC V will be a viable platform for regular users.
This is really great!
Just checked and on my AMD Ryzen 5 the GIMP lava render took 5 seconds (compiled Appimage version) or 10 seconds (every damn other version, no idea why).
So the liechi Pi is a third of that speed, which is pretty damn impressive!
Indeed. If you did performance per watt, it would show even better.
The critical thing I saw here is that a RISC-V board is now outperforming a Pi 4. The price / performance just has to improve a bit more and RISC-V will be a viable alternative in the SBC market. I see it moving to laptops and tablets pretty quickly after that.
Totally independently, there are people trying to make RISC-V work for servers. As ARM has not really succeeded there, RISC-V may even beat them to it.
The place that I expect ARM to continue to dominate for quite some time is Phones. And x64 is not going anywhere for desktop and probably gaming for quite some time.
Performance / watt matters though and, as RISC-V improves, the long term picture for ARM especially gets pretty cloudy.
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I’m surprised he was able to watch Paramount Plus. I would assume that site requires Widevine DRM, and would not assume that it’s available on RISC-V.
As for Blender and Kdenlive not working I’m assuming it’s not because of the ISA like Christopher said, but rather because the board likely ships with crappy GPU driver blobs that only support OpenGL ES and no desktop OpenGL. Which is an important detail that this guy always misses in SBC reviews.
