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> an interview with Eben Upton about RISC-Vs potential This interview is now years-old and is now 100% false, as today we have several competitive-to-Cortex-A7

> an interview with Eben Upton about RISC-Vs potential This interview is now years-old and is now 100% false, as today we have several competitive-to-Cortex-A7 boards available and ready to ship right now.

geerlingguy 4y ago
There was another interview just last week on the Explaining Computers YouTube channel and he did mention RISC-V again. He said that as long as ARM licensing is not too restrictive and expensive, it is much easier and cheaper to integrate ARM cores into SoC designs as they are currently much more widely supported, and core to core are faster than same-year RISC-V core designs. Remember that the A72 cores for the Pi 4 are like 7 years old now... the fastest available RISC-V cores are just catching up.
- netr0ute 4y ago
  > fastest available RISC-V cores are just catching up. Not entirely true, as SiFive has had the P550 and P650 for years, and now the P570 and P670. Those should be a lot faster and they're already available to anybody who wants to fill out an online form.
- sircastor 4y ago
  > it is much easier and cheaper to integrate ARM cores into SoC designs I recall reading that the Pi Zero form factor (or maybe the Pi Zero 2?) was a special SOC package where they put the memory stacked on top of the rest of the chip, which made the form factor work.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    That's old hat. It's called package on package. Used in phones for many years.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  It's too early to say what will happen, really. That being said, nobody is predicting that RISC-V will dethrone Qualcomm or Apple in the next 5 years, but low-end processor adoption isn't always about price. If you're a Chinese manufacturer designing the knockoff 32-bit ARM chips that go into Joe Shmoe's microwave, RISC-V looks a lot more attractive than ARM in the long term. In the end, my prediction is that it will rely entirely on compiler support and Linux packaging. Seeing as most of that RISC bootstrapping work was carved out by ARM, I'm hopeful that RISC-V will find its footing.
sircastor 4y ago
I was mistaken. It's not the A7, It's the A72. This is the quote from Eben in Issue 83 (the winter 2022 issue) of Make:Magazine: "The main things holding RISC-V back in the traditional Raspberry Pi/[Arm] Cortex-A market are a lack of available high-end licensable cores - I don't think I can go out and get anything that's competitive with the Cortex-A72 in Raspberry Pi 4, for example -- and a lack of software maturity in the Linux userland" I suspect that the 'competitive metric' is a combination of price, performance and manufacturing availability.
- snvzz 4y ago
  "I don't think I can go out and get anything that's competitive with the Cortex-A72 in Raspberry Pi 4, for example -- and a lack of software maturity in the Linux userland" Eben Upton's RISC-V knowledge is dated. Both this cpu core and the one in VisionFive2 are quite competitive with A72.

geerlingguy 4y ago

There was another interview just last week on the Explaining Computers YouTube channel and he did mention RISC-V again. He said that as long as ARM licensing is not too restrictive and expensive, it is much easier and cheaper to integrate ARM cores into SoC designs as they are currently much more widely supported, and core to core are faster than same-year RISC-V core designs. Remember that the A72 cores for the Pi 4 are like 7 years old now... the fastest available RISC-V cores are just catching up.

netr0ute 4y ago
> fastest available RISC-V cores are just catching up. Not entirely true, as SiFive has had the P550 and P650 for years, and now the P570 and P670. Those should be a lot faster and they're already available to anybody who wants to fill out an online form.
sircastor 4y ago
> it is much easier and cheaper to integrate ARM cores into SoC designs I recall reading that the Pi Zero form factor (or maybe the Pi Zero 2?) was a special SOC package where they put the memory stacked on top of the rest of the chip, which made the form factor work.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  That's old hat. It's called package on package. Used in phones for many years.
smoldesu 4y ago
It's too early to say what will happen, really. That being said, nobody is predicting that RISC-V will dethrone Qualcomm or Apple in the next 5 years, but low-end processor adoption isn't always about price. If you're a Chinese manufacturer designing the knockoff 32-bit ARM chips that go into Joe Shmoe's microwave, RISC-V looks a lot more attractive than ARM in the long term. In the end, my prediction is that it will rely entirely on compiler support and Linux packaging. Seeing as most of that RISC bootstrapping work was carved out by ARM, I'm hopeful that RISC-V will find its footing.

sircastor 4y ago

I was mistaken. It's not the A7, It's the A72. This is the quote from Eben in Issue 83 (the winter 2022 issue) of Make:Magazine: "The main things holding RISC-V back in the traditional Raspberry Pi/[Arm] Cortex-A market are a lack of available high-end licensable cores - I don't think I can go out and get anything that's competitive with the Cortex-A72 in Raspberry Pi 4, for example -- and a lack of software maturity in the Linux userland" I suspect that the 'competitive metric' is a combination of price, performance and manufacturing availability.

snvzz 4y ago
"I don't think I can go out and get anything that's competitive with the Cortex-A72 in Raspberry Pi 4, for example -- and a lack of software maturity in the Linux userland" Eben Upton's RISC-V knowledge is dated. Both this cpu core and the one in VisionFive2 are quite competitive with A72.