I’m planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
compat wise I think many packages are now available for rv specifically or as .noarch.
perf wise, I think we’re still a ways off, we’re not seeing rv SoCs at the same level of perf / efficiency as arm, and whilst that’s just a matter of time, I’m not sure you’ll have many compelling offerings even a couple years from now, though potentially in 2030?
you can check in with experiences using devices like the PineTab V or even the custom RV mainboard for the Framework 13. There are also several SoCs produced by SiFive on SBCs, some are card sized, some are mATX. These are primarily positioned as development devices, but they may give you some idea of what things are like right now
Thank you, (and others) for helping me understand this thing, maybe this answer is a little off-top but with that info i will be able to learn (sure i can search in internet but i need basis to know what I need to search) :), i’m not new to cpu and it things but risc-v is somewhat difficult to me.
Well I haven’t tried it, but if you want to just play around with it you should be able to emulate a RISC-V system in a VM, e.g. using qemu: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html TL;DR: It’s kinda complicated, lots of different board/chip designs to choose from. But seems possible. Several Distros like Ubuntu/Debian seem to have RISC-V releases around.
That’s fine, it’s an emerging ISA, as with any, it takes some time before perf and sw compatibility reach a good spot.
I think the key novelty to rv especially compared to x86_64 and arm is that there are no licencing restrictions: anyone is free to design and produce products based on that ISA, making more viable for vendors to more easily provide in-house silicon solutions. It’s already become fairly popular in lower power devices, like for IoT and wearables. My smart soldering iron uses a little 32 bit RISC V CPU and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s found some use in automotive, particularly in China.
As we alluded to above, there are several designs available for more general use, and you may find that they handle your compute needs fairly well already, but they won’t be within striking distance of other ISAs if high performance is a requirement.
I know, and i think that i will end up with something like RISC-V as portable laptop and big AMD64 pc for doing heavy things via ssh or directly
I think that could work well. looking forward to more diversity in compute in the future! 😊