I haven't been following the RISC-V story too closely, possibly because I didn't want to get my hopes up only to be dashed. From the article, it sounds like these cores will be developed solely for use in data storage. Can someone with more knowledge tell whether this will help provide the kind of production volume needed to make consumer products (like laptops and desktops) more likely to be viable? Are general purpose chips likely to be one result of the development of RISC-V, or have I missed something fundamental?
Probably we won't be seeing RISC-V application processors for quite a while. There's a lot of stuff that can just be recompiled but there's also a lot of hand-tuned assembly that goes into making a JIT or media codec fast. That's why we're seeing initial adoption in the embedded space, where either there's just a small amount of code to recompile or you were going to rewrite the assembly anyways for the next product.
In the long run using RISC-V in a laptop is a possibility. And there might be some limited production $2000 500MHz FOSS laptop soonish. But in 15 years, say, I could see RISC-V being where ARM is now.
> Out of the whole RISC-V ecosystem it looks like only SiFive is working on that, so it will take time.
If you look at Qualcomm's strategy with x86 competition (using Dynamic Binary Translation), it's not hard to imagine that they might consider building RISC-V application processors; especially once they've proven their ability to deliver enough compatibility and performance with DBT to compete on ISAs for which their device is not licensed (and especially if they are sued by Intel and win, one of those things where you'd jump for joy if you saw a C&D in the mail).
> Can Qualcomm do that? Tegra K1 from nVidia was supposed to be x86 in similar way. They couldn't get a license so it became an ARM core.
NVIDIA bought Transmeta; Transmeta basically proved (by being sued into insolvency) that they couldn't compete on (up to date, still under patent) x86 with hardware or whole-system software DBT for licensing reasons. NVIDIA's K1/Denver products are very similar to Transmeta architectures still, but for ARMv8 instead of x86(or, more interesting, AMD64), and in this case they have an architectural license.
What Qualcomm is doing is different. Qualcomm is doing software-only Dynamic Binary Translation, and they're doing it on a per-application basis (similar to the Mac 68K emulator, Rosetta, WOW64, or QEMU user mode).
It helps that the ISA is supported in more places, even if for awareness alone. Compare where ARM was 10 years ago, where it was 5 years ago, and now we're discussing having competitive alternatives to Intel and AMD in servers.
As new developments seem to happen at an accelerated pace, RISC-V should also see more accelerated adoption. It won't take 30 years to get get to where ARM is today. Maybe only 10, or less.
10 years ago was when the iPhone came out, ARM was already fairly established, better to look at intel’s strongarm acquisition almost 20 years ago, when ARM’s future was much more in doubt.
Specifically their Freedom products [0], which are multicore, 1GHz+ CPUs, with support for standard interfaces like PCIe 3.0, USB 3.0, GbE, DDR3/4.... and ship with Linux support.
Not about to disrupt Intel, AMD, or ARM in the laptop/desktop/server space just yet, but relatively high performance, modern RISC-V SoCs are definitely out there.
Just to point out that they are not actually shipping that fancy HW yet, with or without Linux support. It might materialize one day, but that day is not today.
