I’m very excited for RISC-V adoption in the desktop to become mainstream, as it could help to break the duopoly of x86 CPUs by Intel and AMD and encourage more competition, resulting in better value CPUs for us consumers! Being an open standard, any company can improve upon RISC-V, add additional features, make it more efficient, etc. But aside from this point, I haven’t really heard much information about other advantages of RISC-V.

Could RISC-V theoretically be more efficient than ARM, more performant, etc.? Of course, currently, it isn’t, since most software isn’t optimised for RISC-V CPUs and companies have only just started developing them, but if it’s adopted at a scale like x86 in desktop computers or ARM in mobile devices and servers, would it perform better than the x86 or ARM equivalent? Being a newer architecture (2014) than both x86 (1978 for 16-bit) and ARM (1985), does it have additional QoL improvements over the older architectures?

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
    3·
    5 days ago

    While true, RISC-V probably isn’t the architecture for that. Better to use an old architecture whose patents have expired, and implement it on a new, smaller process.

    RISC-V is good as an alternative to ARMv8 where the use case doesn’t quite fit what ARM is doing — or to implement in a country where there may be restrictions on how ARM is sold/deployed.

    What I’m waiting for is for someone to implement something in RISC-V similar to Apple’s ARM implementation, with all the cores and memory on a single die. No need to do FPGA when you can just fab an unencumbered design in small batches for relatively cheap.

    • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      Better to use an old architecture whose patents have expired, and implement it on a new, smaller process.

      I’m not aware of any examples of an old architecture that was largely reused while ported to a new process, without requiring extensive redesigning of the analog components. Old processor architectures are a product of their day, making assumptions and decisions about the silicon paths that would be wholly invalidated if brought as-is to more-modern processes. It is nowhere near as simple as a copy/paste job of SystemVerilog or RTL.

      To invest even one hour of design time to update, say, the 1970s Intel 4004 design (10 micrometer process) into the 2000s (130 nm) would be more expensive than just using RISC-V for free, which has already been fabricated using 22 nm, among other processes.

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
        1·
        5 days ago

        The MC68000, for example, is over 40 years old and out of patent. It’s been repackaged on a smaller process as the 68SEC000, and there are Verilog implementations available too.

        And that’s just the example that’s top of mind. There’s a whole line of low frequency Atmel processors too, but those are still very much in patent and so mostly tangential to this conversation.

        RISC-V doesn’t really make sense for simpler implementations though; you’d still have to do a bunch of work to simplify it, AND end up with an architecture very few are currently familiar with.

        Once Chinese implementations of RISC-V become endemic and there are enough people familiar with the architecture, it might make sense to start creating custom subsets on simplified processes. But we’re still years away from that.