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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I see too much cheerleadering for RISC-V.

Apple is not going to adopt it, ARM is still fighting against X86 Imperium in the desktop/server market, and the mobile ecosystem of tooling, compilers, libraries and build process just isn't there.

If RISC-V manages to win education market previously targeted by MIPS and microcontroller, that is already quite good.

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Apple is not opposed to RISC-V: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=risc-v (3 jobs available)

The CPU is dozens of processors in any given desktop/server. Thanks to SSD and HDD controllers alone a significant portion of processors in servers are ARM (and RISC-V candidates).

Which are meaningless for most people, probably the last time I cared what CPU was driving the harddisk MS-DOS still ruled the PC world.

Its meaningless to you to consider, but it'll have impact. As ARM took over the controllers world, it gained the volume and engineering efforts to move to phones and mobile... now macs and servers.

That's part of the reason ARM will be very hard to displace. Just like there is a ton of x86 code out there in the server world that's not going anywhere. There is a ton of ARM code (especially peripheral driver code) out there in the uC world. And much, probably most, of it is not open source and not actively maintained.

The good news is compute and memory are getting so cheap it's probably not long until RISCV cores just emulate ARM and solve the problem, all inside a greeting card at a profit...

We've moved past this for the most part. Anything running on an ARM will be almost entirely written in C. At that point, porting to RISC-V becomes much cheaper. As long as the savings from RISC-V exceed the cost of porting the firmware, this is what companies would do.

The code may have been written in C but many drivers are distributed in binary only form with headers. Unfortunately the binaries are often ARM only.

Indeed, after being founded 37 years ago, servers are hardly impacted by ARM, and Macs are meaningless for 80% of the desktop world, which by the way are still Intel in what concerns the Mac Pro workstation.

So cheerleading for RISC-V to overtake in a couple of years what took ARM 37 years to achieve, is really flying high.

AWS is moving big into ARM, and macs are just the first consumer computers to move - not the last. The story isn't over yet.

> so cheerleading for RISC-V to overtake in a couple of years what took ARM 37 years to achieve, is really flying high.

Oh yea i agree it won't be a few years. It'll be many years - but it'll move faster than ARM did just because its so much easier to do today than 37 years ago.

Macs were also the first consumer computers to move into PowerPC.

I can hardly execute Mac software as old as some stuff I have on Windows floppies, backwards compatibility is what keeps x86 ruling on the desktop.

All Javascript based web apps run on ARM Mac and Intel Mac without any rewriting or migrations. Not even with a compat layer like rosetta. When a RISCV OS gets a major browser, then most people (not HN crowd maybe) will be able to do their day-to-day work on it.

Yes stuff from 2000 doesn't run today, and yes, its unlikely that web apps will age well, but it does change how people think about software for the average user. A sufficiently large people don't care about backwards compatibility, and apple's graveyard of un-runnable software proved it.

It's meaningless to us as software developers but I'm sure ARM likes having customers to buy their low spec designs. Every product doesn't have to be a top tier high performance CPU design.

Indeed, and not every RISC-V CPU needs to be 100% open source.

IIRC Western Digital already switched to RISC-V for their storage controllers.

They do, and they affect the industry as much as whatever CPUs they were building in-house before the switch.

I would argue it already has. In 2017/18 in my last year of undergrad, our computer architecture class used RISC-V as the ISA to teach with. Granted, we used the book written by the designers from Berkeley, but our old book was MIPS and also written by them.

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