Fantastic… but on what? RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly.
Is this going to primarily be the newest chipset for cheap Kindles?
Is this going to primarily be the newest chipset for cheap Kindles?
RISC-V is not quite Pi 4 level on the fastest SBC you can buy today, the VisionFive 2, where some kickstarter backers have already received their boards. It's around 80% as fast as Pi 4.
Sipeed have announced their LM4A with TH1520 SoC will be on sale late Q1. They've published benchmarks running at 1.85 GHz showing it is faster than Pi 4 at that speed, but it is supposed to run at 2.5 GHz with a heatsink.
SiFive have announced that their HiFive Pro board will be shipping in the summer, using Intel's "Horse Creek" SoC (which in turn uses SiFive P550 cores). The SoC was demonstrated running by Intel back in September. SiFive says the board will run at 2.2 GHz. It's should be similar performance as an RK3588 at similar clock speed i.e. quite a lot faster than a Pi 4.
Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. They're further away -- 2024 or 2025 -- but there is basically no doubt that they will come.
Android software probably isn't going to be ready for prime time until 2024 or 2025 anyway.
Which companies?
And there was a floodgate opened for high perf core announcements at the recent RISC-V summit. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-n... Most of those are probably bullshiting some major aspect of their cores' perf but there's designs like from from Jim Keller's Tenstorrent too. Jim Keller is sort of known for not bullshitting.
I think there's a lot of potential here and probably a bit less over-promising than you'd get from companies without such experienced design talent.
Specifically, I know two ways:
0. VisionFive 2's SoC has drastically faster GPU and overall better peripherals
1. Raspberry Pi 4 will overheat and heavily throttle at the slightest hint of load. With this in mind, VisionFive 2's CPU will in most situations be faster, by virtue of not throttling.
*. Most heatsinks only mitigate this situation partially. You'd need either active cooling, or to get a 400 instead, which whole keyboards very effectively acts as heatsink.
The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.
This is about Android, which is very different from your average Linux system.
Windows, MacOS and IOS also are, but the community cannot port these.
There are less popular / niche, community-run OS projects like Haiku which already run on RISC-V.
Still some potential pitfalls, hopefully we won’t get super locked down hardware (I’m under the impression that that’s a bit of a problem in the phone universe).
However, they talked about Debian and put it in the category of Linux, and then specifically contrasted against Android as a separate thing, so I think we’re informally talking about the conventional desktop Gnu+SystemD+Too many other groups to list Linux ecosystem.
Current chips in cheap SBCs are already equal or above Raspberry Pi 4 level[0]. Particularly so when most Raspberry Pi 4 do not have a sufficient cooling solution and will be quickly throttled under load.
The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1].
0. https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlP...
1. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-ri...
I'm gonna need to see benchmarks before I believe that.
This defines the interface between hardware and software. If software and hardware both follow the specification, then the software will run on the hardware, and the hardware will run the software.
Both the hardware and the software could be entirely proprietary and extremely locked up, while compliant, as that'd fall well outside the ISA's scope.
The broadcom SOC closed source, and it doesn't have public documentation. Also it has a videocore core running a proprietary RTOS called microsoft ThreadX that does bootstrapping and some low level hardware stuff.
Never knew that Microsoft developed and owned ThreadX:
It's like ARM before v7 or v8, only dumber, because at least ARM back then had an excuse for why they were fracturing it all so badly.
Also, of course, ARM has lots of other IP you need to build a full-blown smartphone SoC; think GPU, display processors and pipelines, video accelerators, ... - to make a RISC-V smartphone you will have to buy all of those in because there is no "RISC-V ecosystem" replacement (and it's rather unlikely there ever will be) and at that point... what's the point anymore?
They actually aren't annoying at all. Real world testing with actual chips is very helpful to the RISC-V Foundation and its extension development and ratification process.