I’m planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
I would love to be able to build a Risc V PC. This is currently impossible is it not? The only Risc V machine I’ve seen for sale is a Raspberry Pi like thing.
_
“2030? So still a long time awa-holy shit that’s four years from now”
I feel old
Naw, just 3 and 3/4.
Remember 2013 it was yester… near 13 years ago… yeah i feel old too although I’m only 21 years old
In the first place, consider why you even want to switch to RISC-V. If it’s because of an enthusiasm for open-source and hearing the ISA described as open, know that any performant hardware you’ll get likely won’t be as open as you expect. The SoC won’t be open-source, the CPU cores in it won’t be open-source, the firmware and bootloader might be an open-source u-boot fork but there’s a good chance it’s proprietary. Even the actual implemented ISA won’t be open since major core designers add custom instructions that aren’t part of the RISC-V spec.
Distros like Ubuntu and Fedora seem slated to treat RISC-V as a main architecture that has close to the same number of packages and the same update schedule as x86/ARM by the end of next year, if not sooner. Just like is also the case for ARM, proprietary software like games can run with a nontrivial performance overhead, and other binary software distributed through other channels outside the distro repos (like docker containers, third-party apt/yum repos, or appimage) is often only distributed for x86 even for things that are open-source and can be compiled for other arches without issue.
The software situation can be either a major annoyance or completely seamless depending on how closely you stick to just the distro repos.
Hardware vendors will probably have stuff comparable enough to recent Intel/AMD for desktop in about a year from now. Likely not better, but within the same realm at least. Within another couple years after that you’ll almost definitely see more than one of the established major SoC vendors (like Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung) release something RISC-V in the desktop, server, or mobile space, which is sure to be competitive with x86 and ARM hardware in that space.
Laptops might not see anything good. An alternate ISA can be viable on servers and mobile (both being Linux-first ecosystems), and desktop can easily inherit from stuff made for server, but laptop has unique hardware needs and the market isn’t there for vendors to bother investing too much R&D on laptop chips that can’t run Windows nor Mac. RISC-V laptops do exist but they’re basically taking chips designed for SBC/edge and throwing them in a laptop shell, with the result naturally being awful at power draw since it was never meant to be a good laptop chip, and the iGPU situation is a mess too. That’s unlikely to change in the next few years.
It may be excitement of something new, I’m a die-hard nonconformist, but I also love it when devices do exactly what I tell them to (which is why, for example, I modified my laptop using UMAF and managed to soft-brick it for the first time in the process :P). Your observation about laptops gives me sadness, because, it’s logical but i have hope that RISC-V laptops will be anyway (what is obvious but not obvious is how anywhere good they’ll be). I may answered your comment a little bit offtopic or chaotic, sorry, but i think you get my point :)
Why does your question sound like you are prompting an LLM? I sincerily hope we are not transitioning to communicating like this, because if I have to read stuff like this once again I think I will have to get offline indefinitly.
To answer your question only Nostradamus can chew whatever you are asking mate, I think that thinking about what computer produced in two years you should buy in 4 years might be a cool video idea for an upcoming youtube channel, but absolutely useless for anything practical today.
That’s a valid point, though it’s not as absurd as it might seem. The thing is, I plan to buy this two-year-old computer in 2030, because perhaps the software will mature on it over the next few years, so that it might run noticeably more efficiently, just like my ThinkPad T470, for example, which ran more and more stably and smoothly over time (up to a point). Maybe what I’m writing sounds a bit like a prompt for an LLM model, but that’s because I’m not used to posting on sites like this (I discovered this site today at 3:00 p.m. and I’ve only had an account for three hours), and as for LLM models, I spend a lot of time on them every day
Please get offline.
If you want to be the Morpheus of someone’s life, go somewhere else, compared to others, you haven’t contributed much to the discussion
I’m giving them what they wanted.
Who?
is this the nuclear fusion by 2020 or our generation?
What do you mean?
I’m not gonna say “don’t do it”, but I’ve dug into this deeply and I’ve turned away from RISC V.
RISC V is slowly being pidgeon-holed into embedded systems. This is not a bad thing, the embedded market (cars, tvs, industrial controls) is huge and diverse.
RISC V has had a very rough start to introduction into bridge-and-bus systems the way we know from Intel/amd because there have simply been too many iterations of CPU registers and capability flags for integrators to take the platform seriously enough to commit to piling a bunch of effort to design, produce, and lead sales on any RISC V platform. Even arm (especially v9) has settled some of these platform issues and is ahead of RISC V in adoption in the integrated platform space (as opposed to embedded).
Long story long, it is extremely difficult to write device drivers for RISC V because one would have to write half a dozen architecture versions, just for a niche platform that barely sells. Conversely, an embedded controller for, say, a vehicle gets a preliminary build and few revisions, ongoing support isn’t part of planning the same way.
As non_burglar said, RISC-V is so far mostly used for small chips for embedded systems. This could change in the future, of course, but you might not have a good RISC-V laptop by 2027-28. There is also a concern that the chips themselves need not be open-source, but there have been open-source designs such as XiangShan, which is comparable to A76.
Currently, your options are DeepComputing’s DC-ROMA, which uses a SpacemiT SoC K1, and Framework’s Laptop 13, which has a StarFive JH7110. Neither CPU is fully open.
On the software side, there is better news. Debian has accepted RISC-V as one of its main architectures.
Like most ISA’s, RISC-V needs it’s decades in the R&D oven to get passed certain hurdles.
Everything from design, standards, pre-fabrication, fabrication and manufacturing has to get to a point that makes RISC-V comparable to ARM or even x86.
I think my metric is having hardware available to the consumer that can run heavy productivity suites, like NLE’s and real-time media processing in general. Once you get there, albeit through accelerators and subroutines, that’s when RISC-V has arrived.
Yes, but (answering to first and second point) today everything is changing fast, so ig that RISC-V evolution will earn something from that run too, but Moore’s law is slowing down so maybe run is at the end, we’ll see
It shouldn’t be hard by 2030 I imagine; particularly if you primarily or exclusively use open source software. The RVA23 chips announced I usually see people comment them as having synthetic benchmark scores at about the Apple M1 level. I regularly use a laptop with a Skylake dual core in it and a Raspberry Pi 5 run off a microsd rather than a m.2 NVME hat. With that in mind, if RISC-V designs don’t get any better than that in the next 4 years, they’ll still be better than hardware that I will still be using. I still use a Raspberry Pi 3. At work every now and then I’ll throw a gitlab runner on a 10 year old desktop to have another thing building when things are busy
There are RISC-V developer boards today with PCI-E slots that you can throw in pretty much any AMD graphics card. The big distributions Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat - they all support risc-v. felix86 is equivalent to box64 and FEX for x86 to ARM:
https://felix86.com/felix86-26-04/
Software support is solid already today. It’s hardware availability for the announced RVA23 designs that’s not mature yet. 4 more years and I imagine in most cases the experience of Linux on RISC-V hardware not being much different than on ARM or x86 hardware
Thanks for info and predictions, it helps me understand and prepare (or more likely - test possible circumstances) to confrontation with my idea/plan
compat wise I think many packages are now available for rv specifically or as .noarch.
perf wise, I think we’re still a ways off, we’re not seeing rv SoCs at the same level of perf / efficiency as arm, and whilst that’s just a matter of time, I’m not sure you’ll have many compelling offerings even a couple years from now, though potentially in 2030?
you can check in with experiences using devices like the PineTab V or even the custom RV mainboard for the Framework 13. There are also several SoCs produced by SiFive on SBCs, some are card sized, some are mATX. These are primarily positioned as development devices, but they may give you some idea of what things are like right now
Thank you, (and others) for helping me understand this thing, maybe this answer is a little off-top but with that info i will be able to learn (sure i can search in internet but i need basis to know what I need to search) :), i’m not new to cpu and it things but risc-v is somewhat difficult to me.
Well I haven’t tried it, but if you want to just play around with it you should be able to emulate a RISC-V system in a VM, e.g. using qemu: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html TL;DR: It’s kinda complicated, lots of different board/chip designs to choose from. But seems possible. Several Distros like Ubuntu/Debian seem to have RISC-V releases around.
Thanks, i will check that, it’ll be good for testing, ig
That’s fine, it’s an emerging ISA, as with any, it takes some time before perf and sw compatibility reach a good spot.
I think the key novelty to rv especially compared to x86_64 and arm is that there are no licencing restrictions: anyone is free to design and produce products based on that ISA, making more viable for vendors to more easily provide in-house silicon solutions. It’s already become fairly popular in lower power devices, like for IoT and wearables. My smart soldering iron uses a little 32 bit RISC V CPU and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s found some use in automotive, particularly in China.
As we alluded to above, there are several designs available for more general use, and you may find that they handle your compute needs fairly well already, but they won’t be within striking distance of other ISAs if high performance is a requirement.
I know, and i think that i will end up with something like RISC-V as portable laptop and big AMD64 pc for doing heavy things via ssh or directly
I think that could work well. looking forward to more diversity in compute in the future! 😊
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Man, I’m trying to soften on AI, but this post is just awful.
