4 ms·

The vector extension in RISC-V is extremely powerful, and I think it will be very interesting to see what can be done with it in a desktop or server CPU down th

• brucehoult 4y ago
  It is. SVE is very similar too. It's going to be interesting between then, because they are both coming out of the blocks at about the same time. The only consumers who have SVE now are owners of this year's phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (Galaxy S22, Xiaomi 12, ...), where it is buried so deep few will be aware of or playing with it. No one at all has mass-production RISC-V vector extension 1.0 just yet. Two popular Chinese SBC makers have said in chat rooms that boards they will announce (maybe even ship) in December do (and with quad 2.5 GHz OoO cores!) I'm slightly dubious but we will see. In any case, some will be coming in 2023 -- and in laptops, not only SBCs. Quite a lot of people have bought cheap RISC-V SBCs using the Allwinner D1 SoC, which implements draft version 0.7.1 of the RISC-V vector extension. Most instructions are unchanged (in both mnemonics and binary encoding) between 0.7.1 and 1.0 but enough very important instructions have changed -- vsetvli and loads and stores, for example -- that code needs to be tweaked to move between them. But 0.7.1 is good practice, and boards start from $17 (1 GHz single core with 512 MB RAM, very similar to a Raspberry Pi Zero) which is a lot cheaper than a sacrificial Galaxy S22.