8 ms·

RISC-V is coming along quite speedily: Milk-V Titan Mini-ITX 8-core board

82 points by fork-bomber 9mo ago

utopiah 9mo ago
At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of) PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
- dietr1ch 9mo ago
  Maybe the open/free part will help with slightly better prices. What a sad world to live in, stochastic bullshit machines and exploding drones get more computers than I
  - goku12 9mo ago
    You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary. It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
    - LeFantome 9mo ago
      I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale. The license cost of the ISA is not that much per chip. It is not nearly enough to equal the extra cost per unit that is going to be added to any upcoming RISC-V chip due to the small production runs compared to x86-64 or ARM. On the microcontroller side, we are seeing what you are saying. RISC-V has taken over the microcontroller world and chips are being produced in the billions. Scale, combined with the lack of licensing, means that you can get RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of bucks. The other thing is that there will still be license fees for RISC-V. You are not paying RISC-V International. But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Instead of paying ARM, you will be paying SciFive, or SpaceMIT or Andes, or Tenstorrent, or UltraRISC (for the Titan board this story is about). But compare this to ARM where your choices are licensing from ARM or purchasing hardware from Qualcomm or Apple. Or compare to x86-86 where there is only Intel and AMD to choose from. There will be dozens of RISC-V suppliers and competition will drive innovation up and prices down. Of course, you can of course always design your own! Or use an Open Source design. No license fees required. But the chips you will actually want to use as a consumer will probably come with licensing fees. But 3-5 years from now, things may be different. I hope and believe that RISC-V will be successful. As RISC-V chips with competitive performance appear, volumes will go up and we will see the same pattern we have seen in microcontrollers. Many of the niches that are currently filled by ARM will start to be filled by RISC-V. This will include the SBC space and the server space for sure. We may see tablets and phones. With luck, it will also start to fill the periphery of the laptop and desktop space. Prices will be higher at first and then come down. RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
      - goku12 9mo ago
        > I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale. Yes. That's exactly my concern too. That can be expected to last until RISC-V application processors are a few magnitudes of order more popular. But it isn't as improbable as it sounds. Just a matter of time. > But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Yes, that will be the licensing cost of the proprietary IP, excluding the hardware costs. > RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us. I hope so too. I'm just saying that it's too early to celebrate right now. It will probably take another half a decade as you mentioned.
        snvzz 9mo ago
        >It will probably take another half a decade Atlantis SoC/devboard, feat. Ascalon, is Q2. That should demonstrate sufficient performance for building products around it, and is ultimately one of many RVA23 options that will show up in chips this year. After that, economies of scale should kick in.
        LeFantome 9mo ago
        I am so excited for Ascalon. It is not that I expect that Ascalon is going to be faster than Apple Silicon or cheaper than ARM. The price/performance is still likely to be such that these kinds of threads will be dominated with critics still saying that other options are better. Many will continue to wonder what the hype is about. But what I fully expect and hope for is that Ascalon will put to rest the idea that RISC-V is some sort of toy platform or that it will be decades if ever before it can compete. Specifically, people will not be able to say that there are no RISC-V chips that can even compete with a Raspberry Pi 5. After Ascalaon, it will not be fringe to propose that RISC-V makes sense for some use cases. Few will see RISC-V as a competitor to Intel, but many more will understand that RISC-V is a viable competitor to ARM. And for us RISC-V supporters, Ascalon/Atlantis may be fast enough to actually use on the desktop. I have Intel based laptops that I still use daily that may not be any faster than Ascalon. That means that, for me at least, Ascalcon will already be fast enough. That is, if I will be able to afford it or even able to buy one. Fingers crossed. I can dream of an Ascalon or Babylon based Framework mainboard. Regardless, the rubicon will have been crossed. RISC-V will only get cheaper and faster after Ascalon. And, while x86-64 and ARM64 will too, there will be many, many RISC-V suppliers. There will be governments directly backing RISC-V research. The better RISC-V gets, the more players there will be and the more momentum the ecosystem will get. My thesis is that it will be hard for ARM and Intel to stay ahead of all these other players. Certainly it will be hard to out-compete them all in every market. Which means that RISC-V will not only become viable but start to lead. And that is a radically different world than the one we live in now. RISC-V is the hardware equivalent of the Linux kernel. And we know how that turned out. Again, fingers crossed.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  > to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes. This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
  - utopiah 9mo ago
    My tinkerings https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 so SpacemiT K1 8 core on BananaPi https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3 https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
- westurner 9mo ago
  A number of distros have support for RISC-V: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, QEMU conda-forge/conda-forge > "RISC-V Support?" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/1744 https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
  - contingencies 9mo ago
    https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V
basemi 9mo ago
Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159
knorker 9mo ago
Oh, no vector extension. Probably a dealbreaker for me.
- akshitgaur2005 9mo ago
  why?
  - stinkbeetle 9mo ago
    Well Linux distros are consolidating around RVA23 target, for one thing (I'm not OP).
  - knorker 9mo ago
    The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
  - 6SixTy 9mo ago
    RISC-V Vector is roughly equivalent to MMX, SSE, and AVX. A lot of tasks without those instructions are flat out slower without.
    - akshitgaur2005 8mo ago
      Ahh, I read that as "Oh no, vector extension" my bad
karlkloss 9mo ago
As things are now, I can only afford boards that take the RAM modules I inherited from my grandfather.
- 0x000xca0xfe 9mo ago
  Luckily this board runs with old DDR4 sticks. If you still have some lying around good for you.
greggsy 9mo ago
The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks. Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board? https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-octa-core-64-bit-risc-v-mini-itx-motherboard-with-a-pcie-gen4-x16-slot/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-o...
fresh_broccoli 9mo ago
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most. The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
- api 9mo ago
  I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop. I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.
- camel-cdr 9mo ago
  The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months: geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076 rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/index.html https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/... There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing. The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
  - kombine 9mo ago
    > The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3. So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?
    - camel-cdr 9mo ago
      The Titan has no SIMD/Vector support at all, so it doesn't support RVA23.
    - snvzz 9mo ago
      The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V. It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.
tw1984 9mo ago
Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling. For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive. Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
- kriro 9mo ago
  Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones. I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.
  - PunchyHamster 9mo ago
    ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here
    - dvdkon 9mo ago
      It matters in that it opens up competition and allows fully-open designs, which should keep prices low and products available, but you're right that having fully-open state-of-the-art chips is unlikely to happen any time soon.
    - tw1984 9mo ago
      exactly. in fact, such ISA is only going to fuel more closed ecosystems as it made hundreds of Chinese vendors to join the game for free, they all suddenly got the chance to build their totally closed platforms.
      - LeFantome 9mo ago
singinishi 9mo ago
[dead]
usamoi 9mo ago
Another chip without V extension.
- LeFantome 9mo ago
  Sadly yes. This should all be behind us soon.
flembat 9mo ago
I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
- LeFantome 9mo ago
  While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying. That said, this is the year. The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5tD https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
  - camel-cdr 9mo ago
    > The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 Don't set your self up for dissapointment. Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower. Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
    - LeFantome 9mo ago
      You are right to be cautious. Ryzen 5 is not Zen 5. So I am not predicting Zen 5 level performance for Ascalon. I am expecting Zen 3 level performance which is to say about as fast as laptops from 2017 to 2020 or so. That is better than what I am typing on now. So, not crushing Apple Silicon just yet but "usable" for the first time. Instead of "there are no RISC-V chips as fast as a Raspberry Pi", it will be "Intel is still faster". It may not even be that ARM is faster anymore. It will be more of a chip by chip comparison. At least people will have to admit that it is a race. I am not looking for RISC-V to be "best in the world" in 2026. Rather, I want to stop hearing that it will never get there. After Ascalon, you will not be able to make the blanket statement that RISC-V is not good enough. It will be good enough in some markets and not in others. It will have a seat at the table. And I want to be able to use RISC-V. Ascalon bring RISC-V into "good enough for me" territory. And RISC-V will only get better. It is getting better faster than other chips are. My thesis is that this will continue (though that is certainly a bold prediction). Even just looking at Tenstorrent, Babylon is not far behind Ascalon. And there is SciFive. And there is Andes. And there is SpaceMIT. And there is Alibaba. And there is Qualcomm. And there are companies I do not know about yet. And there are nation-states. There is a pretty big tidal wave headed for ARM (and maybe even AMD/Intel). First they laugh at you. And then you win.
lazylizard 9mo ago
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
mooracle 9mo ago
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward. High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
- LeFantome 8mo ago
  Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon). The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano. That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance. As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.

82 points by fork-bomber 9mo ago

At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of) PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.

dietr1ch 9mo ago
Maybe the open/free part will help with slightly better prices. What a sad world to live in, stochastic bullshit machines and exploding drones get more computers than I
- goku12 9mo ago
  You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary. It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
  - LeFantome 9mo ago
    I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale. The license cost of the ISA is not that much per chip. It is not nearly enough to equal the extra cost per unit that is going to be added to any upcoming RISC-V chip due to the small production runs compared to x86-64 or ARM. On the microcontroller side, we are seeing what you are saying. RISC-V has taken over the microcontroller world and chips are being produced in the billions. Scale, combined with the lack of licensing, means that you can get RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of bucks. The other thing is that there will still be license fees for RISC-V. You are not paying RISC-V International. But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Instead of paying ARM, you will be paying SciFive, or SpaceMIT or Andes, or Tenstorrent, or UltraRISC (for the Titan board this story is about). But compare this to ARM where your choices are licensing from ARM or purchasing hardware from Qualcomm or Apple. Or compare to x86-86 where there is only Intel and AMD to choose from. There will be dozens of RISC-V suppliers and competition will drive innovation up and prices down. Of course, you can of course always design your own! Or use an Open Source design. No license fees required. But the chips you will actually want to use as a consumer will probably come with licensing fees. But 3-5 years from now, things may be different. I hope and believe that RISC-V will be successful. As RISC-V chips with competitive performance appear, volumes will go up and we will see the same pattern we have seen in microcontrollers. Many of the niches that are currently filled by ARM will start to be filled by RISC-V. This will include the SBC space and the server space for sure. We may see tablets and phones. With luck, it will also start to fill the periphery of the laptop and desktop space. Prices will be higher at first and then come down. RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
    - goku12 9mo ago
      > I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale. Yes. That's exactly my concern too. That can be expected to last until RISC-V application processors are a few magnitudes of order more popular. But it isn't as improbable as it sounds. Just a matter of time. > But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Yes, that will be the licensing cost of the proprietary IP, excluding the hardware costs. > RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us. I hope so too. I'm just saying that it's too early to celebrate right now. It will probably take another half a decade as you mentioned.
      - snvzz 9mo ago
        >It will probably take another half a decade Atlantis SoC/devboard, feat. Ascalon, is Q2. That should demonstrate sufficient performance for building products around it, and is ultimately one of many RVA23 options that will show up in chips this year. After that, economies of scale should kick in.
        LeFantome 9mo ago
        I am so excited for Ascalon. It is not that I expect that Ascalon is going to be faster than Apple Silicon or cheaper than ARM. The price/performance is still likely to be such that these kinds of threads will be dominated with critics still saying that other options are better. Many will continue to wonder what the hype is about. But what I fully expect and hope for is that Ascalon will put to rest the idea that RISC-V is some sort of toy platform or that it will be decades if ever before it can compete. Specifically, people will not be able to say that there are no RISC-V chips that can even compete with a Raspberry Pi 5. After Ascalaon, it will not be fringe to propose that RISC-V makes sense for some use cases. Few will see RISC-V as a competitor to Intel, but many more will understand that RISC-V is a viable competitor to ARM. And for us RISC-V supporters, Ascalon/Atlantis may be fast enough to actually use on the desktop. I have Intel based laptops that I still use daily that may not be any faster than Ascalon. That means that, for me at least, Ascalcon will already be fast enough. That is, if I will be able to afford it or even able to buy one. Fingers crossed. I can dream of an Ascalon or Babylon based Framework mainboard. Regardless, the rubicon will have been crossed. RISC-V will only get cheaper and faster after Ascalon. And, while x86-64 and ARM64 will too, there will be many, many RISC-V suppliers. There will be governments directly backing RISC-V research. The better RISC-V gets, the more players there will be and the more momentum the ecosystem will get. My thesis is that it will be hard for ARM and Intel to stay ahead of all these other players. Certainly it will be hard to out-compete them all in every market. Which means that RISC-V will not only become viable but start to lead. And that is a radically different world than the one we live in now. RISC-V is the hardware equivalent of the Linux kernel. And we know how that turned out. Again, fingers crossed.
embedding-shape 9mo ago
> to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes. This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
- utopiah 9mo ago
  My tinkerings https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 so SpacemiT K1 8 core on BananaPi https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3 https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
westurner 9mo ago
A number of distros have support for RISC-V: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, QEMU conda-forge/conda-forge > "RISC-V Support?" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/1744 https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
- contingencies 9mo ago
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V

basemi 9mo ago

Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159

knorker 9mo ago

Oh, no vector extension. Probably a dealbreaker for me.

akshitgaur2005 9mo ago
why?
- stinkbeetle 9mo ago
  Well Linux distros are consolidating around RVA23 target, for one thing (I'm not OP).
- knorker 9mo ago
  The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
- 6SixTy 9mo ago
  RISC-V Vector is roughly equivalent to MMX, SSE, and AVX. A lot of tasks without those instructions are flat out slower without.
  - akshitgaur2005 8mo ago
    Ahh, I read that as "Oh no, vector extension" my bad

karlkloss 9mo ago

As things are now, I can only afford boards that take the RAM modules I inherited from my grandfather.

0x000xca0xfe 9mo ago
Luckily this board runs with old DDR4 sticks. If you still have some lying around good for you.

greggsy 9mo ago

The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks. Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board? https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-octa-core-64-bit-risc-v-mini-itx-motherboard-with-a-pcie-gen4-x16-slot/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-o...

fresh_broccoli 9mo ago

As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most. The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.

api 9mo ago
I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop. I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.
camel-cdr 9mo ago
The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months: geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076 rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/index.html https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/... There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing. The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
- kombine 9mo ago
  > The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3. So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?
  - camel-cdr 9mo ago
    The Titan has no SIMD/Vector support at all, so it doesn't support RVA23.
  - snvzz 9mo ago
    The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V. It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.

tw1984 9mo ago

Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling. For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive. Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.

kriro 9mo ago
Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones. I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.
- PunchyHamster 9mo ago
  ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here
  - dvdkon 9mo ago
    It matters in that it opens up competition and allows fully-open designs, which should keep prices low and products available, but you're right that having fully-open state-of-the-art chips is unlikely to happen any time soon.
  - tw1984 9mo ago
    exactly. in fact, such ISA is only going to fuel more closed ecosystems as it made hundreds of Chinese vendors to join the game for free, they all suddenly got the chance to build their totally closed platforms.
    - LeFantome 9mo ago

singinishi 9mo ago

[dead]

usamoi 9mo ago

Another chip without V extension.

LeFantome 9mo ago
Sadly yes. This should all be behind us soon.

flembat 9mo ago

I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.

LeFantome 9mo ago
While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying. That said, this is the year. The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5tD https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
- camel-cdr 9mo ago
  > The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 Don't set your self up for dissapointment. Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower. Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
  - LeFantome 9mo ago
    You are right to be cautious. Ryzen 5 is not Zen 5. So I am not predicting Zen 5 level performance for Ascalon. I am expecting Zen 3 level performance which is to say about as fast as laptops from 2017 to 2020 or so. That is better than what I am typing on now. So, not crushing Apple Silicon just yet but "usable" for the first time. Instead of "there are no RISC-V chips as fast as a Raspberry Pi", it will be "Intel is still faster". It may not even be that ARM is faster anymore. It will be more of a chip by chip comparison. At least people will have to admit that it is a race. I am not looking for RISC-V to be "best in the world" in 2026. Rather, I want to stop hearing that it will never get there. After Ascalon, you will not be able to make the blanket statement that RISC-V is not good enough. It will be good enough in some markets and not in others. It will have a seat at the table. And I want to be able to use RISC-V. Ascalon bring RISC-V into "good enough for me" territory. And RISC-V will only get better. It is getting better faster than other chips are. My thesis is that this will continue (though that is certainly a bold prediction). Even just looking at Tenstorrent, Babylon is not far behind Ascalon. And there is SciFive. And there is Andes. And there is SpaceMIT. And there is Alibaba. And there is Qualcomm. And there are companies I do not know about yet. And there are nation-states. There is a pretty big tidal wave headed for ARM (and maybe even AMD/Intel). First they laugh at you. And then you win.

lazylizard 9mo ago

i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?

mooracle 9mo ago

RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward. High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.

LeFantome 8mo ago
Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon). The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano. That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance. As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.