Fingers-Crossed
Eventually, yes. But it’s risky to put timelines on things.
CPU soured are already not the limiting factor. With enough cores, mobile CPUs are fine for most situations. It’s GPU speed that affects most people, and that’s because of games.
You still need base CPU speed for a system to be usable. Try running a modern GPU on a 10 year old CPU. It’s even worse for some, where the GPU driver needs a relatively fast CPU for the GPU to run at full speed. Mostly Intel GPUs have this issue, which is sad cause they are the most affordable, but can’t be paired with an just an affordable CPU (or an older one).
And we’re very far away with RISC-V from the kind of performance your need to run modern games, or even decade old games. Let alone fully utilizing a high end GPU.
I don’t
The bit at 9:20 “the speed at which RISC-V has advanced in the past three years”?
It’s not fast enough to bring RISC-V to our desktops within the next few years. I hope I’m wrong but it’s just painfully slow compared to past ARM development.
What is stopping people from bringing RISC-V to the desktop now? Major distros already support it and you can run x86 programs with box64.
What is not fast enough then?
Two things:
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Desktop requires mature CPUs (large out-of-order designs with high IPC) and there just aren’t really any of those yet. They’re starting to arrive (e.g. XiangShan which is even open source!) but as far as I know there isn’t a single chip available to buy that’s faster than a Raspberry Pi 4.
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Microcontrollers can get away with only the basic instruction set (add, multiply, load, store etc.) but for high performance you need a ton of extensions that are considered standard. x86 and ARM have had decades to build them up but in RISC-V a lot of them are only recently ratified (e.g. Vector) or still in the process of being defined.
I would say we might see cheap Android phones with RISC-V CPUs in maybe 5 years. Though there’s an additional difficulty there in that you need to emulate ARM for games, and I don’t think anyone is working on that.
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Decent enough processors, AFAICT.
Nothing that matches my i5-8350
Well yes the peformance ceraintly hasn’t caught up yet to x86 but the strongest riscv cpu on the market as far as I know has 64 cores on 2ghz. More then enough to run a desktop.
2ghz does not measure it’s computing power though, only the cycle speed. Two very different things.
An objective measure is a simple benchmark:
Here’s a quad core 1.5ghz RISC-V SoC (noted as VisionFive 2) vs a quad core 1.8ghz ARM chip (noted as Raspberry Pi 400).
It’s not even remotely close to usable for all but the most basic of tasks https://www.phoronix.com/review/visionfive2-riscv-benchmarks/6
Yeah, I’ve been watching. I’m waiting with baited breath when I can start using the machines for day to day. Not what I’d use a SBC for. I guess when there’s a ThinkPad that has R-5 I’ll really take notice.
Framework sells a laptop with an R5 board. They warn it’s intended for developers and slower than a Raspberry Pi though.
