Welcome to the First RISC-V Site | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the First RISC-V Site

riscv.jghuff.com

84 pointssusam30 comments

From the handful of RISC-V posts on HN over the years I'm surprised to learn that RISC-V is still so nascent—to the point that simply hosting a webpage on top of it is bleeding edge.

Is it being used for anything yet or is it mostly still in early development? Excuse my naivety, still excited for the tech. Great to see this progress regardless.

Edit: and the song on the site, sounds like Dominican Bachata, like Anthony Santos or something.

It gets good adoption as a small core for control. Nvidia uses it for internal scheduling in their newer GPUs, and Western Digital does too.

This website is silly. After all if he installed a binary package of nginx what makes him think he is the only one to have ever done that?

The original SiFive VisionFive is supported by both Fedora and Ubuntu.[0]

As will the upcoming VisionFive2.

There are likely many such servers out there.

I believe some of Alibaba cloud infra runs on RISC-V don't quote me on it.

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V

Alibab's semi design studio T-Head is big in RISCV. they even ported android 10 to their RISCV processor xuantie

They run a large amount of their infra on it.

Riscv is quite big here in China, as was Power a few years before, due to the bans.

The only power stuff I see in the us is the occasional mention of Talos Computing, old mac's, or game consoles. What other hardware has there been back there? Mostly servers?

Andes Technology claimed 3B RISC-V shipments for 2021.

There are at least a 16 RISC-V devices in my home right now in the form of ESP32-C3s powering smart bulbs, outlets, and light switches. The geek hype train is all about RISC-V taking on general-purpose computing but they've been quietly displacing Cortex-M0, Xtensa LX, etc in devices with fairly low computational needs.

Lots of people are running RISC-V, so this definitely isn't true any more. It was true at a time, but not any longer.

OTOH, I run the only 1U VAX in the world (http://vlc.zia.io), and if anyone else were running anything similar, I'd have heard about it. Still waiting :)

Would be cool to have some more context about the machine itself, it's history and the machine it's attached to through serial.

Perhaps I'll have to make a HN post just for that some time :)

Looking forward to it!

Nice! I wouldn't have guessed one could fit a VAXstation into that short-depth of a 1U.

How do you cool it? (I normally see that Supermicro chassis model used for Atom boards designed to run fanless.)

The VAXstation itself doesn't take much power and therefore doesn't generate too much heat. The power supply moves a small amount of air by virtue of its fans, but not much.

It was tested and runs fine in a room at ambient temperature (72º), fully closed, with no external airflow. Because of this, it should never have issues where it's colocated because the datacenter has positive pressure cooling.

Most of the action seems to be in the RISC-V as MCU space thus far, since that's the simplest path that has significant cost savings opportunity. Western Digital, for example, can use them inside drives instead of ARM and get away from ARM's royalty model.

RISC-V as a desktop or server CPU has economic incentive around it also, just not to the same degree.

It has been popular on this site since very early. I think the audience here exhibits a lot of belief in the power/magic of open source. (It is, after all, a software focused community)

It also started to pick up steam right as Intel was slowing performance advancement.

> hosting a webpage on top of it is bleeding edge

There's absolute nothing bleeding edge in that. The website is really pointless.

Not seeing a date on the website beyond the recent file modification date of the file, but just today I was looking into video streaming (MJPEG over HTTP) from ESP32-CAM, and it's actually in the Espressif's examples for it [1]. Apparently there are web server projects for it around [2], too; would be rather surprising if the first such website appeared only recently.

Edit: though maybe ESP32 SoCs with RISC-V processors aren't that common among those other ESP32 ones.

[1] https://github.com/espressif/esp32-camera

[2] https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-web-server-arduino-ide...

I would expect the ESP32-C6 to become a hit when it will be available as a cheap module like its older siblings.

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c6

> Welcome to The World's First RISC-V Site!

[citation needed]

That’ll be hard? sounds like evidence of absence ahead of it

Really interesting article! I appreciate the detail, it provides a better understanding of the limitations of what's out there currently.

What would server performance be like if you had added a few images and video to the page?

If you're (me) a high-level language developer eg. web, python, things like that... what part of RISC-V would be tangible? Or nothing, just your OS uses RISC-V underneath like emulating an architecture?

Maybe cheaper computers in general.

RISC-V is just another flavor of processor architecture, like ARM and x86. You will have to spend approximately the same amount of time thinking about RISC-V support as you currently do about the other two.

Cheaper devices in general, yes, and eventually, cheaper computers.

LOL.

Far from the first RISC-V site.

How do I buy one?

One example I've seen is VisionFive SBC like an RPi B model. Not sure about reputable.

What’s the difference between RISC-V and the Motorola RISC processors used long ago before switching to Intel?

Not sure why you're asking specifically about a comparison with Motorola RISC chips (like the 88k). There were a lot of chips, from different companies, over the years in the "risc / reduced instruction set" category.

RISC is a general category of processors (with the other main category being CISC). There have been dozens of mainstream RISC processors over the last 40 years, RISC-V is just one that happens to use RISC in the name. Kind of like Microsoft SQL Server, there have been plenty of other SQL database servers in the past but Microsoft decided to use SQL as part of the name.

Nice guitar work man.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com