RISC-V is currently already being used in MCUs such as the popular ESP32 line. So I’d say it’s looking pretty good for RISC-V. Instruction sets don’t really matter in the end though, it’s just licensing for the producer to deal with. It’s not like you’ll be able to make a CPU or even something on the level of old 8-bit MCUs at home any time soon and RISC-V IC designs are typically proprietary too.
Until risc-v is at least as performant as top of the line 2 year old hardware it isn’t going to be of interest to most end users. Right now it is mostly hobbyist hardware.
I also think a lot of trust if being put into it that is going to be misplaced. Just because the ISA is open doesn’t mean anything about the developed hardware.
It doesn’t usually work that well in practice. I have been running an M1 MBA for the last couple years (asahi Arch and now Asahi Fedora spin). More complex pieces of software typically have build system and dependencies that are not compatible or just make hunting everything down a hassle.
That said there is a ton of software that is available for arm64 on Linux so it’s really not that bad of an experience. And there are usually alternatives available for software that cannot be found.
I feel like linux users benefit the most from arm since we can build our software natively for arm with access to the source code.
no love for RISC-V?
RISC-V is currently already being used in MCUs such as the popular ESP32 line. So I’d say it’s looking pretty good for RISC-V. Instruction sets don’t really matter in the end though, it’s just licensing for the producer to deal with. It’s not like you’ll be able to make a CPU or even something on the level of old 8-bit MCUs at home any time soon and RISC-V IC designs are typically proprietary too.
Until risc-v is at least as performant as top of the line 2 year old hardware it isn’t going to be of interest to most end users. Right now it is mostly hobbyist hardware.
I also think a lot of trust if being put into it that is going to be misplaced. Just because the ISA is open doesn’t mean anything about the developed hardware.
Same goes for RV, OpenRISC, MIPS and other architectures.
Is MIPS still around? I know it was used a lot in embedded stuff but last I heard they were shutting down development of new MIPS chips.
Baikal T comes to mind.
It doesn’t usually work that well in practice. I have been running an M1 MBA for the last couple years (asahi Arch and now Asahi Fedora spin). More complex pieces of software typically have build system and dependencies that are not compatible or just make hunting everything down a hassle.
That said there is a ton of software that is available for arm64 on Linux so it’s really not that bad of an experience. And there are usually alternatives available for software that cannot be found.
Couldn’t we do that with x86?
We can. The point is that Windows users can’t compile for arm. They depend on the Dev to to it. That will take some time and some won’t do it at all.