I Believe RISC-V Will Come to the End-User Market Within the Next Few Years
I Believe RISC-V Will Come to the End-User Market Within the Next Few Years
I Believe RISC-V Will Come to the End-User Market Within the Next Few Years
I don't
The bit at 9:20 "the speed at which RISC-V has advanced in the past three years"?
It's not fast enough to bring RISC-V to our desktops within the next few years. I hope I'm wrong but it's just painfully slow compared to past ARM development.
What is stopping people from bringing RISC-V to the desktop now? Major distros already support it and you can run x86 programs with box64.
What is not fast enough then?
Two things:
I would say we might see cheap Android phones with RISC-V CPUs in maybe 5 years. Though there's an additional difficulty there in that you need to emulate ARM for games, and I don't think anyone is working on that.
Decent enough processors, AFAICT.
Nothing that matches my i5-8350
It's not even remotely competitive on power vs. X86 processors.
Chip designs take time. Then people need to license and manufacture them. We may see marketable performance on servers this year.
For SBCs, the performance has gotten to usable but price / performance sucks. That is a bit of a chicken / egg popularity problem so timing is tough to call. The rift between the US and China is slowing things down. We would have the Milk-V OASIS otherwise.
Desktop is really tough to call timing. The tech could probably be there next year. As ARM is showing though, you need a desktop OS (with market share) to drive that market. It is not going to be Apple. Microsoft cannot even make ARM work. So desktop Linux hardware on RISC-V may be a while.
Some Android phones and tablets could go RISC-V in 2026. If that happens, the same chips could appear on ITX boards for enthusiasts.
Qualcomm could surprise with RISC-V support after what ARM did to them. AheadComputing or somebody else could surprise as well. Mostly likely though, it is just going to take time.
You can run RISC-V on a “desktop” today if you want . Grab a ROMA II or Framework 13. Expect it to be slow.
Eventually, yes. But it's risky to put timelines on things.
CPUs are already not the limiting factor. With enough cores, mobile CPUs are fine for most situations. It's GPU speed that affects most people, and that's because of games.
There are 4 main bottlenecks in computers, and they generally take turns being the most relevant. CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. Bus speed can also be a bottleneck, but that is generally factored in and we know how to make faster buses for the most part, using parallelization if nothing else.
Right now, for home computer use, GPU is the biggest factor. Good thing, too, because CPUs are plateauing, and will probably require a fundamental change in architecture or programming techniques to get past it.
You still need base CPU speed for a system to be usable. Try running a modern GPU on a 10 year old CPU. It's even worse for some, where the GPU driver needs a relatively fast CPU for the GPU to run at full speed. Mostly Intel GPUs have this issue, which is sad cause they are the most affordable, but can't be paired with an just an affordable CPU (or an older one).
And we're very far away with RISC-V from the kind of performance your need to run modern games, or even decade old games. Let alone fully utilizing a high end GPU.
"Most people" do not play video games at all.
And most people don't complain about computers being slow anymore. And when they do, it's usually because of memory, disc, or network speeds. It's almost never because of CPU cycles. The people complaining about performance that's related to cycles are usually complaining about GPU processing.
It's almost never a CPU power issue, anymore. Unless you're a developer or scientist, and you're actually trying to compute something. I have two beefy computers in my house - my desktop, for coding, and my media server, because Jellyfin insists on transcoding everything. The rest are all ARM, and mostly old ARM, and they're all perfectly capable of doing their jobs. RISCV would be, too.
Looking forward to playing Dosbox on it
Fingers-Crossed