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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

If the west does not adopt RISC-V, then it will simply fall behind China.

I don't think this is something we want.

China has spent ages trying to get their local MIPS derivatives to a place where they're competitive, but haven't succeeded. Adopting or not adopting RISC-V (which is only an ISA, not an actual platform) won't make a lick of difference.

That assumes that RISC-V is a competitive advantage over ARM and x86. While I have no particular grounds for pessimism about RISC-V, it seems a bit premature to assume that it's better in practice than those others.

riscv does have something that arm/x86 doesn't have: intense implementation competition at every perf/price point

Lots of companies are throwing their hat in trying to design a riscv core.

You can do a riscv startup, its much harder to do an arm startup and near impossible to do an x86 one

I've been hearing about how RISC-V is going to crush the market for over a decade, and the only fully-functional RISC-V-based product on the market is a soldering iron. Everything else is some kind of DIY proof of concept kit of no use to any actual consumer or business. The architecture has about fifteen or twenty years before they are any kind of meaningful threat to x86_64, assuming it lasts that long.

There is a chance you're using RISC-V CPUs right now. Nvidia GPUs use them for their management logic (GSP) and Seagate/Western Digital are using them for HDD controllers. ARM used to only be used in these kinds of workloads too, you have to work your way up the stack.

Since RISC-V is barely ten years old that's quite a statement.

Introducing a new instruction set is an enormous undertaking, taking multi-decades typically. If anything, the adoption of RISC-V and its momentum is astonishingly fast.

They had hardware in 2011. Development preceded that milestone by some years at Berkeley, which is where I was first told about its impending market domination.

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