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
You must log in or # to comment.
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 :)
The common issues with RISC-V laptops, or rather any laptops made with SoCs that weren’t designed to be laptop-first, include things like sleep not putting the system in a low enough power state (battery will run out if you leave it folded without turning it off), underwhelming GPU, higher power draw when idle, and lower peak performance for intermittent load. If none of those are a dealbreaker, the newest DeepComputing Framework board (on K3) can arguably be considered a viable daily driver RISC-V laptop option, though I wouldn’t want to use it as one.
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are the big names for GPUs and they all have products that integrate a GPU into the same SoC as the CPU, but none of them would be likely to license out their GPU IP to other SoC vendors in modern times. Same goes for the in-house GPU designs for Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung. ARM does license out its Mali GPU IP, and that’s often the go-to option for SoC vendors that don’t have their own in-house GPU, but RISC-V systems can’t use that. So RISC-V systems’ GPU options effectively amount to either:
- Use separate processors for your CPU and GPU. Desktop/server can just slot in a video card. Laptops in the 15-inch or larger space often solder a GeForce or Radeon chip to the board. Smaller 13-inch laptops normally don’t do this because of cooling and battery life concerns.
- License the integrated GPU from Imagination. That seems to be the only notable GPU offering available to license on non-ARM. Users don’t seem very fond of Imagination GPUs but they’re better than nothing.
- Pray that one of the companies with an established GPU portfolio decides to not only enter the RISC-V space but also makes a RISC-V processor that can be used in laptops. I think that’s unlikely and they’ll probably focus on server only.
deleted by creator
What do you mean?
deleted by creator
Okay now I understand, thank you for explanation :)
If it can help you, Phoronix made some benchmarks last year to compare a RISC-V motherboard to Raspberry Pi : https://www.phoronix.com/review/sifive-hifive-premier-p550.
I think 2027/2028 would be too soon to expect a good RISC-V “daily driver” (in terms of performance and support) because it takes time for an architecture to evolve but I hope I’m wrong.
I know, I mean, I want to use computer from 2028 in 2030, having hope that software will optimize, unlocking full potential of this devices (if there will be any in 2028 laptop)
‘RISC-V is sloooow – Marcin Juszkiewicz’
Encountered this here on Lemmy a few days ago, haven’t looked into it properly. If you search for the article’s title, you should find the post and comments.
To my knowledge, modern CPUs have a lot of hardware acceleration for various common algorithms, specifically regarding media. This is orthogonal to the architecture itself, and I’m not sure that risc-v platforms implemented all that stuff, seeing as it’s been developed for x86/x64 over decades.
Pardon my ignorance but doesn’t having specialized acceleration functionality go against the whole “Reduced Instruction Set” thing?
In theory probably yes, in practice from what I’ve heard ARM has some CISC-style instructions — presumably exactly because they offer performance increases.
even without going too-CISC it can make sense to have instructions for popular use cases
e.g. ARM has special instructions for optimal numeric operations in JavaScript: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/dui0801/h/A64-Floating-point-Instructions/FJCVTZS
and I thought I’d read something about custom instructions in Apple Silicon to optimise virtualisation (i.e. translation of x86_64 executables) but I can’t find a source for that, maybe that secret sauce is not in the instruction set
Yeah, what I’ve read is that ARM is in fact a mix of RISC and CISC. And meanwhile x64 processors turn some CISC instructions into a bunch of simpler ones as one of the first execution stages. So in the end the situation is basically this:
RISC-V is designed to be an extensible instruction set, where the base is very minimal and reduced but a plethora of extensions exist. The ISA can be small for academic and microcontroller uses, large (more than a hundred extensions) for server uses, or anything in between.
Despite the name, a powerful RISC-V server can arguably not be considered “RISC”, though that term doesn’t have a single agreed-upon meaning and some design characteristics strongly associated with RISC still apply such as limiting memory access to dedicated load/store instructions only rather than allowing computation instructions to operate on memory.
Also, not everything is CPU instructions. Acceleration for media codecs, for example, normally means off-loading those tasks to the GPU rather than the CPU. Even if the CPU and GPU are both part of the same SoC, that doesn’t touch the CPU instruction set.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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! 😊
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.
deleted by creator
