this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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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?
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.