this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Please somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I really don't find the "chip makers don't have to pay licence fees" a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.
I imagine it's likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn't what's holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.
Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community's focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I'd be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.
Efficiency too. I think RISC-V is mostly not made by these companies, which is why their efficiency is below x86_64 and performance is below an Intel Core 2 Duo
So RISC-V is less performant and less efficient? That's opposite to what I heard about it, at least for the efficiency.
Compared to ARM, so makes total sense.
Lower ISA license fees do nothing to help desktop users directly. The fact that “anybody can make one” is what will help. The competition and innovation that RISC-V will drive will eventually be a massive boon to end-users.
It is not hard to “make your own chips” anymore. The barrier to entry has dropped tremendously. Apple has their own chips. Google has their own chips. Samsung has their own chips. Microsoft even has their own chips. Except none of them actually “make” processors. They are all fabricated ( manufactured ) by TSMC in Taiwan. Only Intel really makes its own chips and even they do not make all of them. TSMC would fabricate chips for you too if you placed a big enough order.
It is less about the cost of the license and more about being able to license it at all. Only AMD and Intel can design chips implementing the x86-64 ISA. ARM is not much better. Only huge customers can get a license to create novel ARM chips. Most ARM customers are licensing core designs off of ARM themselves ( eg. Cortex
Anybody can legally design a RISC-V CPU—even you! So, if you are a company or country that cannot get access to x86 or even ARM ( like Alibaba / China ) then RISC-V is your answer. Or if you have an innovative idea for a chip, RISC-V is for you. And since it is Open Source, RISC-V allows you to collaborate on designs or even give them away:
https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
The “desktop” market is incredibly hard to break into but that is because the “desktop” market is more about the operating system and its applications.
Apple can move to whatever ISA they want as they control both the hardware and the operating system. They have migrated several times, most recently to ARM with “Apple Silicon”.
Microsoft would love to move to ARM to compete with the power efficiency of Apple Silicon. Outside of gaming, the “desktop” market these days is laptops where things like battery life really matter. Microsoft has failed a few times though because of the application side. The recent push with Qualcomm X Elite looks the most promising but time will tell.
Only Microsoft and Apple matter on the desktop.
I use desktop Linux but Linux is less than 5% of the desktop market. That is a shame because Linux, with its vast ecosystem of Open Source applications, is a lot easier to port to new architectures.
You can run a RISC-V Linux desktop today. It will be super slow but you can do it.
We need RISC-V to get faster and more power efficient. Thankfully, there is competition.