Linux

I am one of those waiting for RVA23. SpaceMIT claimed they would ship by the end of 2025 but that is seeming very unlikely.

To be honest, I am really waiting for Ascalon now (itself RVA23). Tenstorrent says they will ship a version of their own silicon mid-2026. And the guy that created AMD Ryzen says it will be about as fast as Ryzen 5. We will see what it costs though. This chip “exists” but nobody is manufacturing the silicon yet.

If you don’t care about the vector instructions, this is pretty tempting though: https://milkv.io/titan

But RVA23 will be so much more compatible going forward. I would expect all RISC-V software to work with RVA23 for a long time and for most RISC-V software to require RVA23 in 2026 and beyond. It is like when the Intel ecosystem went 32 bit. “386 compatible” was the standard for well over a decade acting as the minimum but also remaining sufficient.

I know RVA23 maps to x86-64v4 and you can still run plain old RV64I or RV64GC on RVA23 but you cannot run 32 bit code on it. So the x86 to x86-64 transition is not a perfect analogy. But you can run a standard Linux distro released in 2025 on Intel hardware released in 2005. RVA23 may be like that.