Layman question: how many years before we get RISC-V desktops or Raspberry Pi like computers?
Single Board Computers - https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed this seems to fit the bill. However, they don't seem to be selling those yet - the development kit for that particular CPU seems to be an FPGA soft-core.
I am currently working on an open-hardware project that requires a fair amount of grunt (or FPGA); in an effort to keep is open I was looking into RISC-V processor's. You can actually buy RISC-V hardware today as a guy on the street (i.e. Digikey etc.) but the offerings I could find were generally fast microcontrollers rather than general purpose processors.
If RISC-V is to be adopted it's probably more of a question of engineering knowledge and training than solely hardware: One of the chips I found in my search above is an interesting Chinese system on module that has a RISC-V at 400MHz, Wi-Fi, and a hardware NN coprocessor - it's a cool chip but even in Chinese the documentation is unusable and awful.
If a big western company like ST or Cypress etc. picks up RISC-V and starts making it easy and safe to actually use (for example, the section of the manual for the serial peripherals on most NXP microcontrollers is longer than all the documentation I could find for the aforementioned SoM).
The HiFive Unleashed was released (and for sale) back in 2018. From memory, there was a limited run (priced at US$1k each), as it was targeted to specific types of developers looking to do further work improving the platform.
For example, Red Hat bought some and used them for improving the RISC-V support in Fedora. From memory, Richard Jones (@rwmj here on HN) was involved with it.
In Chinese though? Or did you compare long English to short Chinese?
Because, I don't speak (or read) it either, but compared to English it's extremely information sense: its characters are closer to whole words than to Latin letters. In fact if you think of it also being like German, with Longerwordbuiltfromothers, they are, and L... would be just a few characters at most.
Not that that makes Chinese documentation any more helpful to us non-speakers, though.
I did some google translate-ing and had some help from my token Chinese friend. I might have missed it but the document had the same structure in English and Chinese. In short, you could probably work it out by reading the rtos they distribute for you to use and there is a little documentation of the actual peripherals but it is absolutely bare bones. And that's (what we would call) application notes, the actual datasheet is pretty much just some marketing BS and a PCB footprint (not that they actually provide any symbols - sometimes even the big chip makers don't bother which is quite annoying if you're stuck using anything other than Altium)
There is no RISC-V equivalent of BIOS / UEFI, multiboot, etc. We take it for granted that all motherboards and all bootable drives 'just work'. That kind of consistency is important for consumer desktop PCs (less so for rasberry-pi type machines).
This is being worked on, and I think a stable specifications are not too far away. I imagine it will still take firmware developers a long time to create motherboards that fit the spec, considering they are starting from scratch. Here is a recent presentation about the state of booting RISC-V[1].
[1]https://content.riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Summit_...
(Please, instead of downvoting me, just correct me?)