I really do want to see risc V succeed in the desk top and laptop space. The fact that there are only two major architectures and both are owned by companies is a serious potential issue. Especially if they both ended up being owned by one company somehow.
Well, kind of 3 companies.
Intel and AMD both have rights to x86_64, since they both held patents used by it. In 2021, AMD’s patents expired.
Then there’s ARM, which is solely owned by Arm Holdings.
But yes, it’s still very much a big problem, and I really hope RISC-V succeeds to solve that problem. Licensing core designs is a much better motive and business model than licensing an entire ISA.
Edit: oh wait, you said two architectures, not two companies. Never mind, you’re right. :)
RISCy click of the day
How usable is this? I don’t know much about RISC-V. But when I DL software I only ever see X64 and ARM options.
Around the Raspberry 5 or lower level from what I read. More for developers than for practical use, but then again, I don’t have real world experience with it.
Probably even worse than that.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks/2
This has less RAM, but it’s the same CPU. You can see it’s consistently 3 to 4 times slower than a Raspberry Pi 4! They are not joking about this not being for general use.
A Dev board like this is pretty cool, though. It could help pave the way to a performant board later.
Right now, not very. Basically only open source software can run on it, and only if it’s either exceptionally portable or has been tweaked to compile for it.
In the future, hopefully this is usable for general computing, but right now it’s basically only usable for R&D or niche applications.
The path forward for RISC-V is getting it into more developers’ hands though, so having it available for really nice hardware like the Framework is awesome.
Well, the second sentence of the linked post is:
This is very much a developer-focused board to help accelerate maturing the software ecosystem around RISC-V, so we recommend waiting for future RISC-V products if you’re looking for a consumer-ready experience.
So I’m gonna go with not very.
Thanks to box64, a lot of software can actually run on RISCV when using Linux, but the performance is just about pushing Raspberry Pi 4 levels at best.
But also, if you have source code for some software available in ARM/X64 you can usually just compile it for yourself - A lot of compilers already support RISCV, but obviously distros won’t bother maintaining apps in lesser used architectures
The native performance of this board is similar to a Raspberry Pi 3. With Box64 it’ll be significantly worse.
There’s quite a push behind RISC-V now, in part because China seems to like the idea of not being tied to American or British companies for their CPU architecture. We’ll see whether it actually pass out or not.
I looked up the stats and yeah it’s more like A55 vs A72 (pi 4b) but to reiterate my point of compatibility and potential performance over the next few years:
15fps in witcher 3 is wild for an architecture that is running through a compatibility layer and is incredibly immature. I’d also note that I’m not sure how much overhead box64 has, it’s not emulation the same way WINE is not an Emulator, which as we know allows it to be as fast as native Windows sometimes.
This might be interesting with Gentoo. I know compilation with probably be slow. But you can highly customize it for RISC-V I think.
They also sell bare chassis, if you need something to put it in.
My hope is that in 5 years its supported enough to run on a Homeserver, without config and treiber issus. I hope Projekt like these give enough uplift for developers to get this train startet
