6 ms·

I wonder if this will contribute to the world having RISC-V laptops sooner rather than later.

• jimmaswell 7y ago
  Why would we want RISC-V on laptops?
  • sigzero 7y ago
    Just reading up on it, the big thing pushing this is that the instruction set is completely open source. That's why someone might want it. https://hackernoon.com/why-we-need-risc-v-f94e3929891b https://hackernoon.com/why-we-need-risc-v-f94e3929891b
    • Nokinside 7y ago
      The cost of licensing instruction set is very small part of licensing. High performance microarchitecture is never going to be open source. They cost hundreds of millions to design and the design stays relevant only 4-5 years.
  • Taniwha 7y ago
    Why not? a diverse ecosystem of silicon with some actual competition is going to help get us out of this US-centric intel/amd world where all laptops are essentially the same
    • ummonk 7y ago
      It appears likely that Apple will be transitioning to ARM for its laptops in the future so regardless we should start seeing architecture diversity in laptops.
      • zamadatix 7y ago
        Microsoft and Google have already mass marketed multiple iterations of ARM laptops (the latter to great success in certain spaces) but "2" is not much diversity. Power has remained an active player but not in the laptop/phone/mobile space (even still very niche in workstation). RISC-V will bring much needed diversity to spaces currently dominated by two titans.
      • jimmaswell 7y ago
        For even the top models? How can that be performant?
  • cmiles74 7y ago
    Maybe it won't contain a vendor "management engine". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims_that_ME_is_a_backdoor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Claims...
    • gruez 7y ago
      Maybe, but I doubt it. It's there to support a bunch of features that companies want (eg. remote management, trusted computing, etc.). The reason why the consumer version has it is that most consumers don't mind, and having a seperate sku with it disabled/not present would cost extra. This won't change with RISC-V. You might be able to get a low performance part without it, but all the mainstream (ie. high performance) parts will have it.
      • madez 7y ago
        Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. With RISC-V, it is reasonable to expect multiple vendors to provide CPUs. There is a very good case to expect non-backdoored chips.
        • gruez 7y ago
          >Intel has a huge variety of different models. They are experts in market segmentation. They could do that. But they won't, and there are few who could do that. That's true, but the way they do that is in a way that requires minimal changes. In terms of the management engine, that means not including AMT module (software) but keeping the rest of the ME (hardware). After all, it also does some essential things like power management and the bootloader. Removing it completely would also mean re-implementing the essential functionality. The best you can hope for if you want to use mainstream parts is something like me cleaner where the management engine is only there for the boot, but is disabled afterwards. Something without an management engine would certainly possible, but would be limited to niche products like the librem.
          • 7y ago
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    if not for anything else why not simply for competition, more choice and lower prices?
• wmf 7y ago
  What OS would they run?
  • AlexeyBrin 7y ago
    A Linux distro probably, at least initially.
    • FullyFunctional 7y ago
      Mostly likely, but Android is but a recompile away (sure, not so for 3rd party apps). Even today, with hardly any hardware, there's (to various degree of completion): Debian, Fedora, Slackware, FreeBSD, and seL4.
      • dahfizz 7y ago
        > sure, not so for 3rd party apps. Ideally, once there is a JVM that runs on riscv, those apps are ported for free. An openJDK port is underway. I have no idea how much work it would be for Android to port its APIs, but Google certainly has the manpower if this is something they want.
        • FullyFunctional 7y ago
          I don't know why there would be _any_ porting involved. Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. The major pain points today are the JITs, which applies to Java and JavaScript in particular. There has been preciously little (public) progress on these.
          • dahfizz 7y ago
            > Arm and RISC-V are so similar that the compiler should take care of it. But the compiler (openjdk in this case) still needs to be ported, no? EDIT: I think we are talking about two different things. The Java compiler (which emits Java bytecode) should be ported for convenience but that is not necessary. The compiler which compiles the actual JVM into an executable doesn't need to be ported, but it does need to have support added for emitting riscv machine code.