True. RISC-V is out of my radar, what I'd really prefer is any linux laptop that's got >10h battery life and low heat output. Probably that's something that both ARM and RISC-V have in common?
Yeah. My thought is that RISC-V has the potential to be very competitive in terms of compute/watt and compute/$. At the very least versus x86, but hopefully also with arm
Let’s be real. ARM got a chance because it excelled in a very specific use case: low power. Unless RISC-V differentiates itself in a significant way, it won’t replace ARM.
For what it is worth ARM is proprietary and has binary blobs. The Raspberry Pi depends on them. RISC V is a different and open source architecture with the potential to build systems without dependencies on closed source. From a practical standpoint, RISC-V is probably still a bit away from forming the basis of a practical laptop.
Making a Linux laptop is orthogonal to RISC-V (or ARM or Intel). It's going to cross shopped against Microsoft and Google and Apple. Even with open microcode, the big feature difference is at the operating system...people buy software first and hardware second (at best). If you have a solution to the problem of selling Linux, pivoting to different hardware like RISC-V becomes a purely logistical matter. If you don't have a solution to selling Linux laptops, then it doesn't matter what hardware it runs on. If the goal is to get beyond one and done Kickstarter scale, then sustainable sales of Linux is the hard problem. Good luck.
Not sure why you'd say that - especially if you look at Arm v9 and the fact that the architecture is starting to make inroads into there server market.
RISC-V is open source which is great in some respects but also not helpful in others.
That's one opinion. Another ARM engineer who contributed one heck of a lot more to ARM's success (designed ARM7TDMI, Thumb, Thumb2) says RISC-V is great. See at 51 minutes in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6sh097Dk5k
I think (though I'm no expert) it's more likely that RISC-V will be in embedded devices and appliances around your house than in your laptop, where even ARM is a dubious proposition at this point.
Given the open IP and ease of customization, we might even see RISC-V inside peripherals or on the motherboard in a PC doing specialized tasks. But not as the main CPU.
I would say RISC-V is still unmature in some areas. ARM is far more than ISA, for example the interrupt controller in a modern ARM SoC is more complex than a RISC-V core. Can anyone provide a viable RISC-V alternative with proper Linux support soon?
Another issue is performance. We simply don't know how RISC-V performs compared to latest ARMs.
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