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?
Two things:
Desktop requires mature CPUs (large out-of-order designs with high IPC) and there just aren't really any of those yet. They're starting to arrive (e.g. XiangShan which is even open source!) but as far as I know there isn't a single chip available to buy that's faster than a Raspberry Pi 4.
Microcontrollers can get away with only the basic instruction set (add, multiply, load, store etc.) but for high performance you need a ton of extensions that are considered standard. x86 and ARM have had decades to build them up but in RISC-V a lot of them are only recently ratified (e.g. Vector) or still in the process of being defined.
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.
https://sg2380.org/
From what I can tell this might be almost as fast as a RPi 5 (single core). Which is almost as fast as my 12 year old i5-2500K. I guess we'll find out when it is available.
I definitely think we'll get an M1/Zen class RISC-V CPU eventually but I doubt this is it.