7 ms·
What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
- mcdow 6mo agoI’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years
- znpy 6mo agounironically, this. i've been hearing about arm computer for almost twenty years and only just recently general-purpose decently-priced arm laptops have been released (qualcomm laptops, the macbook neo). and arm desktop are still not a thing, in practice.
- Joker_vD 6mo agoWell, Apple M1/M2/etc. are, technically, ARMv8, and they're available as desktops.
- Joeboy 6mo agoAlso the Acorn Archimedes is, technically, an ARM / RISC desktop.
- bluebarbet 6mo agoDistant memories of a 1980s London classroom.
- znpy 6mo agothey're not general-purpose in the sense that you can run any operating system nor they're decently priced.
- andai 6mo agoI think the Surface Laptops (2018?) count, and arguably the previous models (2012+) sorta-kinda count (tablet + keyboard). Side note: It's kinda funny to me that "the keyboard is detachable, the screen is glass and you can touch/write on it" makes it "lesser" than a laptop rather than being an upgrade. But yeah, definitely happy to see more in this space. Now we just need e-Paper laptops to take off as well :)
- mavhc 6mo agoI have an ARM desktop from 1986 or 1987 https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A500.html https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A500.h...
- znpy 6mo agotechnically true, practically irrelevant.
- heresie-dabord 6mo ago> arm desktop are still not a thing The desktop market is not the only product space anymore. Apple has had brilliant success with its ARM processors, proving that ARM is more than capable. Before Apple's switch, Chromebooks had been using ARM since 2011. Android is the dominant operating system in mobile and most Android devices use the ARM platform. Many of these devices have desktop capability -- they are a viable convergence platform.
- 3abiton 6mo agoWhile its current performance is not competitive, there are currently interesting options. I got the orange pi riscv version, mainly to test riscv while it's slow compared to other arm socs, it's still better than I expected. There are even risc v TPUs now.
- ninth_ant 6mo agoThis underestimates the will of governments and companies Europe and especially China to reduce their dependency on US-controlled technology.
- Tostino 6mo agoI hope our complacent companies get a shot of competition.
- wk_end 6mo agoARM isn't US controlled, is it? British and also now Japanese since it's owned by SoftBank. Meanwhile, wouldn't China be more heavily invested in Longsoon?
- hajile 6mo agoARM is British (America’s closest ally) and proprietary. If you’re swapping, just eliminate the risk and cost entirely. LoongArch is 32-bit instructions only. This means no MCUs due to poor code density. That forces them into RISCV anyway at which point, you might as well pour all your money and dev time into one ISA instead of two. RISCV has way more worldwide investment meaning LoongArch looks like a losing horse in the long term when it comes to software.
- gggmaster 6mo agoQuite the contrary, the fragmented ecosystem is holding RISC-V back. There are currently 3 variants of LoongArch ISA. The reduced 32-bit version targets MCUs. And LoongArch64 ATX/MATX motherboards with UEFI support is readily available. This makes it far more easier to develop with LoongArch.
- hajile 6mo agoWhat evidence do you have that RISC-V is being held back by fragmentation? Every upcoming general purpose RISC-V core I'm aware of is targeting RVA23. That's even less fragmentation than x86 has. Meanwhile, I don't know of ANY third-party chip designs using LoongArch, so asserting no fragmentation seems to be misrepresenting the situation a bit.
- aappleby 6mo agoYou're probably already using a RISC-V computer, it's just embedded as a supervisor in some other gadget (or vehicle) you own.
- themafia 6mo agoI look forward to running my _own_ software on a RISC-V computer.
- HankB99 6mo agoI already do: https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c3 https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c3 The tool chains that Espressif seem to work pretty well with these as well as their earlier (some sort of RISC) processors. I have had some code, however, that did not produce desired results until I upgraded the toolchain. The other issue I've run into is that some cell phone battery packs that work well with Raspberry Pis won't stay on with the RISC-V ESPs because they draw so little power the battery pack doesn't detect the load.
- wg0 6mo ago[flagged]
- IshKebab 6mo agoI think 10 years is a more realistic estimate. Probably first in servers and Android phones.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 6mo agoThey are everywhere already in microcontrollers like ESP32.
- IshKebab 6mo agoYeah but op was talking about directly using a RISC-V computer. The embedded RISC-V CPUs are effectively black boxes.
- LeFantome 6mo agoHyperscalers are using RISC-V servers today. Here is an example from SiFive (USA). https://www.sifive.com/blog/investing-in-our-next-chapter-of-growth https://www.sifive.com/blog/investing-in-our-next-chapter-of... And here is an example of Alibaba using RISC-V for inference and training in the cloud: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/04/08/china-alibaba-data-center-ai-chips-zhenwu.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/04/08/china-alibaba-data-cente... Those are both up and running today. And of course there is Tenstorrrent: https://tenstorrent.com/ip/risc-v-cpu https://tenstorrent.com/ip/risc-v-cpu
- bityard 6mo agoI already have one! (But it's technically a soldering iron...)
- LeFantome 6mo agoPinecil?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- LeFantome 6mo ago> I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer I may be using this one soon: https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-risc-v-mainboard-iii-for-framework-laptop-13-early-access-program https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-risc-v-mainb...
- stuxnet79 6mo agoNot my area of expertise but what exactly is the difference between RISC-V and Power PC? Didn't Power-PC get a good run in the 90s and 2000s? Just wondering why there's renewed interest in RISC-like architectures when industry already had a good exploration of that area.
- Chyzwar 6mo ago[flagged]
- topspin 6mo ago"It is Chinese companies looking for ARM alternative" The V in RISC-V represents iteration of the ISA, over the last 46 years, most of which occurred in the US, mainly at Berkeley.
- avadodin 6mo agoThey push it to save a couple nickels per core on the ARM licenses, not out of nationalistic fervor. And it is the Chinese doing it because virtually 100% of all chips are made in China and Taiwan.
- MobiusHorizons 6mo agoThat's not really how it works. There are only a few companies on the planet that are licensed to create their own cores that can run ARM instructions. This is an artificial constraint, though and at present China is (as far as I know) cut off from those licenses. Everyone else that makes ARM chips is taking the core design directly from ARM integrating it with other pieces (called IP) like IO controllers, power management, GPU and accelerators like NPUs to make a system on a chip. But with RISC-V lots of Chinese companies have been making their own core designs, that leads to flexibility with design that is not generally available (and certainly not cost effective) on ARM.
- charcircuit 6mo ago[flagged]
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- shakna 6mo agoThere's an email signup box on the right side on desktop, or bottom of the page on mobile. Maybe you somehow managed to hit it, or see it during some component update.
- ljhsiung 6mo ago> Enabling new business models This is true, but only for the bigger players. The nature of hardware still fundamentally favors scale and centralization. Every hyper-scalar eventually gets to a size that developing in-house CPU talent is just straight up better (Qcom and Ventana + Nuvia, Meta and Rivos, Google's been building their own team, Nvidia and Vera-Rubin, God help Microsoft though). This does not bode well for RISC-V companies, who are just being used as a stepping stone. See Anthropic, who does currently license but is rumored to develop their own in-house talent [1]. > Extensibility powers technology innovation >> While this flexibility could cause problems for the software ecosystem... "While" is doing some incredible heavy lifting. It is not enough to be able to run Ubuntu, as may be sufficient for embedded applications, but to also be fast. Thusly, there are many hardcoded software optimizations just for a CPU, let alone ARM or x86. For RISC-V? Good luck coding up every permutation of an extension that exists, and even if it's lumped as RVA23, good luck parsing through 100 different "performance optimization manuals" from 100 different companies. > How mature is the software ecosystem? 10 years ago, when RISC-V was invented, the founders said 20 years. 10 years later, I say 30 years. The nature of hardware as well, is that the competition (ARM) is not stationary as well. The reason for ARM's dominance now is the failure of Intel, and the strong-arming of Apple. I have worked in and on RISC-V chips for a number of years, and while I am still a believer that it is the theoretical end state, my estimates just feel like they're getting longer and longer. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-weighs-building-it-own-ai-chips-sources-say-2026-04-09/ https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-weighs-building-i...
- adgjlsfhk1 6mo ago> good luck parsing through 100 different "performance optimization manuals" from 100 different companies. Imo this is pretty misguided. If you're writing above assembly level, you can read the performance optimization manual for Intel, and that code will also be really fast on AMD (or even apple/graviton). At the assembly level, compilers need to know a little bit more, but mostly those are small details and if they get roughly the right metrics, the code they produce is pretty good.
- camel-cdr 6mo ago> good luck parsing through 100 different "performance optimization manuals" from 100 different companies This would be a problem for any ISA with multiple/many vendors.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoI stopped listening to what Canonical says. They often get involved in things and disturb the ecosystem then abandon stuff or dig a "not invented here" hole. Unity, Bazaar, Mir, Upstart, Snap, etc. All of them had existing well established projects they attempted to uproot for no purpose other than Canonical wanted more control but they can't actually operate or maintain that control.
- unethical_ban 6mo agoNot sure on the timelines, but snap, upstart and Mir were all attempts at evolving Linux ecosystem that lost to RedHat-backed systems. Unity was legit abandoned, and bazaar... Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoWayland was created in 2008. Mir was created in 2013. Bazaar and Git were created around the exact same time. Unity was abandoned after a failed attempt to circumvent Gnome 3. I was actually involved with the development of Compiz and they hired Sam to work on Unity, as he was one of the masterminds behind Compiz, but again they just didn't have the vision or execution to make it work.
- pjmlp 6mo agoUnity was great, after it was abandoned I tried yet again GNOME 3, me that in the past have collaborated with Gtkmm, ended up moving into XFCE, and nowadays I am fully on macOS/Windows anyway. If I ever go back to GNU/Linux full time, GNOME certainly won't be it.
- ddtaylor 6mo agoThings improved a lot with Gnome over the years, but as a fellow Gnome 2 user the initial release of 3 and the following years were a real kick in the teeth. Things have improved, but the overall Gnome Foundation attitude hasn't improved. They are still very stubborn and remove basic features. This seemed to start when they did their infamous "focus groups" where they claim users can't understand basic things. I get the desire to provide a cohesive experience, but I think you can do that while also giving people control. KDE is shaping up to be much better and it's likely because Valve is providing commercial support and exposing it to a larger audience. Cosmic is the new kid backed by system76 and its pretty nice too and may rescue Gnome in some ways in due time.
- storus 6mo agoWill RISC-V end up with the same (or even worse) platform fragmentation as ARM? Because of absence of any common platform standard we have phones that are only good for landfill once their support lifetime is up, drivers never getting upstreamed to Linux kernel (or upstreaming not even possible due to completely quixotic platforms and boot protocols each manufacturer creates). RISC-V allows even higher fragmentation in the portions of instruction sets each CPU supports, e.g. one manufacturer might decide MUL/DIV are not needed for their CPU etc. ("M" extension).
- hajile 6mo agoRVA23 is the standard target for compilers now. If you support newer stuff, it’ll take a while before software catches up (just like SVE in ARM or AVX in x86). If you try to make your own extensions, the standard compiler flags won’t be supporting it and it’ll probably be limited to your own software. If it’s actually good, you’ll have to get everyone on board with a shared, open design, then get it added to a future RVA standard.
- storus 6mo agoThanks, that however addresses only a part of the problem. ARM is also suffering from no boot/initialization standard where each manufacturer does it their own way instead of what PC had with BIOS or UEFI, making ARM devices incompatible with each other. I believe the same holds with RISC-V.
- hajile 6mo agoThere has been concerted effort to start working on these kinds of standards, but it takes time to develop and reach a consensus. Some stuff like BRS (Boot and Runtime Services Specification)and SBI (Supervisor Binary Interface) already exist.
- Findecanor 6mo agoThere is a RISC-V Server Platform Spec [0] on the way supposed to standardise SBI, UEFI and ACPI for server chips, and it is expected to be ratified next month. (I have not read it myself yet) [0]: https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-server-platform
- ur-whale 6mo agoI've played with a bunch of RISC-V platforms, mostly SBCs in the raspi class Beyond the potential platform fragmentation due to the variability of the ISA (a very unfortunate design choice IMO), mentioned elsewhere in this thread, what I find most frustrating is the boot process / equivalent of BIOS in that world. My impression: complete lack of standardization, a ton of ad-hoc tools native to each vendor, a complete mess, especially when it comes to get the board to boot from devices the vendor didn't target (eg SSDs). Until two things happen: 1. a CPU with a somewhat competitive compute power appears (so far, all the SBC's I've tried are way behind ARM and x86) 2. a unified BOOT environment which supports a broad standard of devices to boot from (SSD, network, SD-Card, hard-drives, etc...) the whole RISC-V thing will remain a tiny niche thing, especially because when a vendor loses interest in the platform, all of the SW that is native to the platform goes to rot immediately (not that it was particularly good quality in the first place).
- pezezin 6mo ago> 2. a unified BOOT environment which supports a broad standard of devices to boot from (SSD, network, SD-Card, hard-drives, etc...) I got the same experience tinkering with ARM devices. It soured me so much that I have decided that until ARM offers a unified boot mechanism like x86 PCs do, I will ignore it, no matter the supposed benefits.
- LeFantome 6mo agoDo you have a lot of experience with x86 SBCs? The RISC-V server spec mandates UEFI, ACPI, and SBI. Here is a RISC-V “desktop” motherboard that has the same: https://milkv.io/titan https://milkv.io/titan
- pezezin 6mo agoI have touched some PC-98 and FM Towns, which are x86 but not IBM PC compatible. But I understand your point, ARM has its roots in embedded systems and it shows. I really hope that RISC-V learns from that mistake and focuses on standardization, the board you linked looks very promising.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]