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The hardware has been around for a while now... You have cheap low level micros like the ESP32-C4 and you have affordable CPUs like Alibaba T-Head, Allwinner D

The hardware has been around for a while now... You have cheap low level micros like the ESP32-C4 and you have affordable CPUs like Alibaba T-Head, Allwinner D1, StarFive JH7110 Boards are available: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/05/06/lichee-pi-4a-risc-v-sbc-raspberry-pi-4-th1520-processor/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/05/06/lichee-pi-4a-risc-v-... https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/02/pine64-star64-sbc-starfive-jh7110-quad-core-risc-v-processor-imagination-gpu/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/02/pine64-star64-sbc-st... https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/03/14/asus-tinker-v-risc-v-single-board-computer-tinker-board-3-sbc-with-rockchip-rk3568-soc/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/03/14/asus-tinker-v-risc-v... Linux distros and essential libraries has been more or less ported. There are some rough edges here and there, but on the whole all the pieces are there (software and hardware).. and yet the uptake has been slow. Turns out, while cool to hear about, most people at the end of the day don't really care about what architecture they're running.

baq 3y ago
Most people care about if it’s on a list of vms to buy on AWS. It took amazon a ~decade to get graviton to something worth using.
- plam503711 3y ago
  (XCP-ng founder here) I'm more optimistic for RISC-V. For all the devs who worked on it here (at https://vates.tech https://vates.tech), they told me it's very easy to work with since it's close to many Arm design principles. That's why I believe it's important to prepare the platform today for those future machines. I think it's a great opportunity to not only get an alternative both x86 and Arm, but also really opening the choice of the design, letting new players mastering both hardware and software (I have to admit that's something I'm considering for my business at some point).
  - contrarian1234 3y ago
    I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip Most of the big moves in the RISC-V space seem to be coming from the low-end and from China. They might have trouble making the jump to a true x64 M1-like competitor given the geopolitics with cutting edge chip manufacturing (TSMC etc.) I think other players are going to have funding issues to take on the big players as the open nature of RISC-V seems to mean it's harder to build an IP moat. I've noticed a lot of the Chinese chips come with stuff like NPUs to set themselves apart and presumably get some lock in on their "platforms". But that's just my naiive impression reading some blogs and looking at releases. (ie. I have no idea what I'm talking about)
    - plam503711 3y ago
      I don't think it will be "instant change". I agree on the gradual result, but I think it might be faster than we think. Yes, it also depends on the ecosystem, but I think the world is more ready for ISA diversity than ever.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      >I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip I don't know why. It's not inherently better than any of the current architectures in meaningful way, just doesn't require license. IIRC royalty per ARM chip was somewhere in single digit percentages which is basically meaningless for everyone but the chip company, or few big companies making super low margin stuff.
      - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
        the expensive part of an arm license isn't the money, it's the fact that you have to deal with it (and be highly reliant on a 3rd party that doesn't share your interests).
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  QEMU is probably the most used, most powerful non-embedded RISC-V platform today. If a customer really wants RISC-V for server applications, it's probably the fastest way to do this today- it seems we're still pretty far from server-grade RISC-V silicon.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    >it seems we're still pretty far from server-grade RISC-V silicon. Ventana Veyron's just that, and meant to ship before 2023 ends.
fithisux 3y ago
These are not good for day to day use like raspberry. It will take a bit but at the end the ISA will matter.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  There have been way better options since almost the beginning in terms of design/arch/boarddesign than RPi with their weird VCore monster. Nobody has displaced them in like a decade. I doubt a change of architecture is the final push needed
- rjsw 3y ago
  I can buy a RISC-V board, I can't buy a Raspberry PI.
  - MrFoof 3y ago
    That is actually starting to change, and per Eben Upton’s very recent interview with Jeff Geerling, should be approaching back to normal for hobbyists in coming months. I’ve checked rpilocator a few times this week to find 4Bs available every single time. Not tons and not everywhere, but they’re starting to have availability again.
- ilyt 3y ago
  ISA will not matter. Features and how well it works out of the box will. rPi have hundreds of competitors and they still sell by far the most amount of SBCs, because "it just works" with many things supporting it out of the box
neilv 3y ago
The provenance of the ASUS Tinker V units is Taiwan and Japan? I wonder whether they'll embrace open firmware and mainline Linux (including all drivers) for the entire board. That's what I really want from RISC V offerings. (Though I understand the current motivation of many with RISC V is simply to avoid ARM licensing fees, and that having trustworthy and long-term sustainable hardware usually isn't a requirement in IoT.)
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  Don't hold your breath. They've had a incredibly disappointing track record with Tinkerboards. Taiwan and Japan .. have a horrible record with open source as far as I can tell? I can't think of any counterexamples right now - and they don't have a Silicon-Valley/Shenzhen hacker cultural hubs to push things along externally
- snvzz 3y ago
  It's based on a bad chip that violates the privileged spec, by having a hardware pinned TLB entry. On a really bad memory location that breaks standard Linux userspace. It will never be able to run standard distributions, only bespoke for the device. Categorically avoid, and hope the next generation Renesas chip is less dumb.
arp242 3y ago
> the uptake has been slow. Turns out, while cool to hear about, most people at the end of the day don't really care about what architecture they're running. Price is a factor. €140 for the Lichee which "nearly catches up with standard ARM board performance like Raspberry Pi 4" (their own words from the AliBaba page) is hard to justify for most, especially since this also comes with less mature ecosystem support. The $90 Pine64 is cheaper but also slower than a RPI4 and Pine64 is a "by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts" type of deal, which means stuff like 30-day warranty (which is a fine, just not a good fit for many uses). There is no price for the Asus one yet, but it's a lot slower than a RPI and judging from their other boards I bet it's going to be a lot more expensive.
- ilyt 3y ago
  And price's supposed to be reason to move. The whole industry's buzz about RISC-V is pretty much "yay, we don't need to pay ARM for license".
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    the price will take time and volume. to me risc-v is interesting largely because of how well thought out their vector instruction set is. it really shows the advantage you get when you are the last one to implement a feature and can see how everyone else messed it up.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Well, yeah, but not something someone would buy CPU for unless said CPU with vector extensions is faster or more energy efficient than competition.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        Next year will have Tenstorrent's (CEO: Jim Keller) Ascalon, led by Wei-han Lien, who also led the M1 project at Apple, and expected to have similar IPC as projected Zen5 (also TBA 2024) but using significantly less power. It has a range of smaller variants, potentially able to cover a range of products including servers, laptops and smartphones.
IshKebab 3y ago
That doesn't mean the ecosystem is mature though. How many chips support RVA22?
- brucehoult 3y ago
  Uh, "none", because the ratified version of RVA22 was published on April 2, 2023, less than two months ago? We'll probably see the first boards with SoCs supporting RVA22 in the first half of 2024.
jrtc27 3y ago
The SoC IP used in ASUS's Tinker V deliberately violates the virtual memory spec in a way that affects userspace, rendering certain virtual addresses unusable. This region overlaps with the default base address of position-dependent executables, so those cannot and will not run on it unless rebuilt with a different explicit base address.
officeplant 3y ago
It still feels like a broken mess on my Starfive Vision2, but things are improving. I just think I'm not developer brained enough to fix the rough edges. Debians repo's are still missing a lot of riscV ported software but that takes time.
- snvzz 3y ago
  My experience with VF2 has been great. I love the standard RISC-V boot process. My board runs Arch from NVMe. The weakest link seems to be the GPU driver (Imagination Technologies), as it is proprietary and not very good. We know they are working on a mesa3d driver, but I am not sure it will cover the GPU variant used in the VF2 SoC.

baq 3y ago

Most people care about if it’s on a list of vms to buy on AWS. It took amazon a ~decade to get graviton to something worth using.

plam503711 3y ago
(XCP-ng founder here) I'm more optimistic for RISC-V. For all the devs who worked on it here (at https://vates.tech https://vates.tech), they told me it's very easy to work with since it's close to many Arm design principles. That's why I believe it's important to prepare the platform today for those future machines. I think it's a great opportunity to not only get an alternative both x86 and Arm, but also really opening the choice of the design, letting new players mastering both hardware and software (I have to admit that's something I'm considering for my business at some point).
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip Most of the big moves in the RISC-V space seem to be coming from the low-end and from China. They might have trouble making the jump to a true x64 M1-like competitor given the geopolitics with cutting edge chip manufacturing (TSMC etc.) I think other players are going to have funding issues to take on the big players as the open nature of RISC-V seems to mean it's harder to build an IP moat. I've noticed a lot of the Chinese chips come with stuff like NPUs to set themselves apart and presumably get some lock in on their "platforms". But that's just my naiive impression reading some blogs and looking at releases. (ie. I have no idea what I'm talking about)
  - plam503711 3y ago
    I don't think it will be "instant change". I agree on the gradual result, but I think it might be faster than we think. Yes, it also depends on the ecosystem, but I think the world is more ready for ISA diversity than ever.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    >I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip I don't know why. It's not inherently better than any of the current architectures in meaningful way, just doesn't require license. IIRC royalty per ARM chip was somewhere in single digit percentages which is basically meaningless for everyone but the chip company, or few big companies making super low margin stuff.
    - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
      the expensive part of an arm license isn't the money, it's the fact that you have to deal with it (and be highly reliant on a 3rd party that doesn't share your interests).
cbm-vic-20 3y ago
QEMU is probably the most used, most powerful non-embedded RISC-V platform today. If a customer really wants RISC-V for server applications, it's probably the fastest way to do this today- it seems we're still pretty far from server-grade RISC-V silicon.
- snvzz 3y ago
  >it seems we're still pretty far from server-grade RISC-V silicon. Ventana Veyron's just that, and meant to ship before 2023 ends.

fithisux 3y ago

These are not good for day to day use like raspberry. It will take a bit but at the end the ISA will matter.

contrarian1234 3y ago
There have been way better options since almost the beginning in terms of design/arch/boarddesign than RPi with their weird VCore monster. Nobody has displaced them in like a decade. I doubt a change of architecture is the final push needed
rjsw 3y ago
I can buy a RISC-V board, I can't buy a Raspberry PI.
- MrFoof 3y ago
  That is actually starting to change, and per Eben Upton’s very recent interview with Jeff Geerling, should be approaching back to normal for hobbyists in coming months. I’ve checked rpilocator a few times this week to find 4Bs available every single time. Not tons and not everywhere, but they’re starting to have availability again.
ilyt 3y ago
ISA will not matter. Features and how well it works out of the box will. rPi have hundreds of competitors and they still sell by far the most amount of SBCs, because "it just works" with many things supporting it out of the box

neilv 3y ago

The provenance of the ASUS Tinker V units is Taiwan and Japan? I wonder whether they'll embrace open firmware and mainline Linux (including all drivers) for the entire board. That's what I really want from RISC V offerings. (Though I understand the current motivation of many with RISC V is simply to avoid ARM licensing fees, and that having trustworthy and long-term sustainable hardware usually isn't a requirement in IoT.)

contrarian1234 3y ago
Don't hold your breath. They've had a incredibly disappointing track record with Tinkerboards. Taiwan and Japan .. have a horrible record with open source as far as I can tell? I can't think of any counterexamples right now - and they don't have a Silicon-Valley/Shenzhen hacker cultural hubs to push things along externally
snvzz 3y ago
It's based on a bad chip that violates the privileged spec, by having a hardware pinned TLB entry. On a really bad memory location that breaks standard Linux userspace. It will never be able to run standard distributions, only bespoke for the device. Categorically avoid, and hope the next generation Renesas chip is less dumb.

arp242 3y ago

> the uptake has been slow. Turns out, while cool to hear about, most people at the end of the day don't really care about what architecture they're running. Price is a factor. €140 for the Lichee which "nearly catches up with standard ARM board performance like Raspberry Pi 4" (their own words from the AliBaba page) is hard to justify for most, especially since this also comes with less mature ecosystem support. The $90 Pine64 is cheaper but also slower than a RPI4 and Pine64 is a "by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts" type of deal, which means stuff like 30-day warranty (which is a fine, just not a good fit for many uses). There is no price for the Asus one yet, but it's a lot slower than a RPI and judging from their other boards I bet it's going to be a lot more expensive.

ilyt 3y ago
And price's supposed to be reason to move. The whole industry's buzz about RISC-V is pretty much "yay, we don't need to pay ARM for license".
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  the price will take time and volume. to me risc-v is interesting largely because of how well thought out their vector instruction set is. it really shows the advantage you get when you are the last one to implement a feature and can see how everyone else messed it up.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Well, yeah, but not something someone would buy CPU for unless said CPU with vector extensions is faster or more energy efficient than competition.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      Next year will have Tenstorrent's (CEO: Jim Keller) Ascalon, led by Wei-han Lien, who also led the M1 project at Apple, and expected to have similar IPC as projected Zen5 (also TBA 2024) but using significantly less power. It has a range of smaller variants, potentially able to cover a range of products including servers, laptops and smartphones.

IshKebab 3y ago

That doesn't mean the ecosystem is mature though. How many chips support RVA22?

brucehoult 3y ago
Uh, "none", because the ratified version of RVA22 was published on April 2, 2023, less than two months ago? We'll probably see the first boards with SoCs supporting RVA22 in the first half of 2024.

jrtc27 3y ago

The SoC IP used in ASUS's Tinker V deliberately violates the virtual memory spec in a way that affects userspace, rendering certain virtual addresses unusable. This region overlaps with the default base address of position-dependent executables, so those cannot and will not run on it unless rebuilt with a different explicit base address.

officeplant 3y ago

It still feels like a broken mess on my Starfive Vision2, but things are improving. I just think I'm not developer brained enough to fix the rough edges. Debians repo's are still missing a lot of riscV ported software but that takes time.

snvzz 3y ago
My experience with VF2 has been great. I love the standard RISC-V boot process. My board runs Arch from NVMe. The weakest link seems to be the GPU driver (Imagination Technologies), as it is proprietary and not very good. We know they are working on a mesa3d driver, but I am not sure it will cover the GPU variant used in the VF2 SoC.