Sorry for my ignorance, but any idea when we can see Desktop Processors powered by RISC-V architecture? It would be breath of fresh air to see new architectures power the desktops.
I think the meaningful question is when we'll see RISC-V CPUs that are performance competitive with x86 or ARM CPUs. In that case, probably not in the near future, at least not for several years at least. x86 and Arm CPUs have decades of optimization behind them. That's the CPU designs themselves, and also compilers, etc. RISC-V has a lot of catching up to do, and Arm and x86 aren't static targets.
That isn't to say that RISC-V won't catch up. There's real momentum behind RISC-V. Also, the development of software built using machine learning introduces wildcards and the possibility of disruption. So in the medium to long term (end of the decade, maybe?) we might see interesting cell phones or laptops that are useful for more than Hacker News tinkerers. I'm looking forward to them.
>when we'll see RISC-V CPUs that are performance competitive
As you said, Arm and x86 aren't static targets. So while they'll catch up to where Arm is today, Arm will be somewhere further ahead at that point. Especially as implemented by Apple silicon. My concern remains that Apple will have to investment strength to always be a few years in the front. Their lead could in fact increase. And that's just CPU.
Also pioneer pricing, as can be expected. But it has uATX form factor, ddr4, pcie3, usb3, sata3 connectivity. You could certainly build a nice desktop with it.
When I seen this Milk-V Pioneer platform I was very enthusiastic: looks like what I need (minus IPMI, but I can omit this requirement) - one slot for 10G network, one slot for HBA, M.2 slots for caches, I can select RAM (in opposite to most of these platforms, where RAM is soledrid-on), plus ability to experiment with new platform. Looks perfect.
But... $1499?! Plus VAT to import to Europe?!
Sorry. I pass :-(
Why does it cost SO MUCH!?
On other hand... There is NO comparable production RISC-V platforms. You say "It has 64 cores" - well, it is good argument when there is choice. But there is no choice on RISC-V side, there is no such platform with 32 or 8 or any other number of cores. So, I compare what I can buy with "RISC-V" badge and what I can buy with "amd64" badge. When I choose EPYC I could choose from 8 cores up to 64 cores, according to my wallet and needs. For 1000 euro I could have good, proven MoBo which offers more than this "development platform" (i.e. IPMI and VGA exit, which means I don't need any videocard to occupy so precious PCIe slot - and I think, it is good idea for DEVELOPMENT platform to have full remote control & access, IPMI or some other) and 8 core/16 threads first generation EPYC (which will be faster core-to-core, I'm sure), NEW. If I agree to buy second-hand hardware it will be about 550 euros (same mobo, same CPU). For 1400 euros I will get NEW 16 cores / 32 thread EPYC + mobo combo, or about 700 euros second-hand.
Yes, I know, development vs. production, but this situation stays the same for years now.
BTW, situation is the same with ARM platforms too - there is no way to buy "big desktop/small-server class" ARMv8 board with good set of expansion slot.
Sure, it's 4 times the performance, but it's also going to be several times the price.
Even a prebuilt 7950X (16 core) machine costs more than the Pioneer, at leas the ones I've found on the net.
I'm already own good chassis, HBA, 10G network adapter and lot of HDDs :-)
Except I really don't think it's fair to call RISC-V 12 (or 13) years old. Sure, that's when some university guys in a pub said "fuck it, we should just make our own ISA" and started throwing ideas around, but it was a long long time before it was frozen and there was something companies could start building on.
That happened in July 2019. just over 4 years ago, which I think should be counted as the zero date.
When did Arm start working on Aarch64? I don't think we have any idea — as far as I know they've never said. My guess is it was around the 2003 release of AMD64. But the world learned about it when they published the finished ARMv8-A spec in October 2011.
If 2011 is the date for ARMv8 then the fair comparable date for RISC-V is 2019.
> only been making chips for 5 years
Five years ago, the only RISC-V chips were one-off ones made in Berkeley university, and the FE310-G000 and FU540-C000, which were also made by those same guys as were in that pub, manufactured in total volumes of a few hundred, and with no guarantee they would be compatible with the eventual ratified standard.
With the HiFive Unleashed SiFive "shipped a draft spec", which is exactly the same thing they shit on Canaan (K210, priv arch 1.9.1, literally a snapshot of the Rocket repo) and THead (C906/C910 RVV 0.7.1) for. They just got lucky that no breaking changes were made, unlike the other guys.
It's the same for the Talos II using IBM's POWER. It costs a lot because a) it is designed as a workstation and b) the volume just isn't there.
Economies of scale basically.
Obviously DigiKey doesn't have the chipset ICs, but at quantities of 100 just the connectors, VRMs, passives and the big 8-layer PCB to house it was so much higher.
Like I knew it would be higher, but this exercise really put industrialized manufacturing and economy of scale into perspective.
Because it is their first generation chip, thus small production run.
You can either wait for the next one (SOPHON SG2044, with V 1.0 extension, TBA 2024) or get something that's mass-produced now, such as SBCs or tablets based on the JH7110 or TH1520 SoCs.
Actually 2024.
SiFive P870, Tenstorrent Ascalon, SOPHON SG2044, Ventana Veyron, and more.
Add 3-4 years for cores to make their way into CHEAP mass-production hardware. People who describe this as "not in the near future" are probably still in school.
Not a decade. For sure not "at least a decade".
If your benchmark is x86 from ~2016-2018 then maybe. But the competition is moving forward as well (and Intel, AMD and ARM have a lot more money to invest into R&D)
Yet their ISAs are much more complex and thus they actually need to invest that much more money.
I could make a similarly unsubstantiated claim that their chips are much faster than RISC-V ones because of that (of course they are unambiguously faster it's just that this is not the only reason).
And anyway if RISC-V is to become competitive it will have to become much more complex as well..
Debate won't prove it, but it's true and time will tell -- and not very much time, at that.
> Debate won't prove it,
I find this (almost) religious style fanaticism about something as mundane as an instruction set quite fascinating.
RISC-V is inevitable.
> CISC dogmatism
Besides the fact that your understanding of what CISC/RISC means seems to be stuck in the 90s and the distinction is pretty much irrelevant at this point, you do actually realize that ARM is a RISC architecture?
> blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value
For microcontrollers? Sure. For high-end/general purpose chips? RISC-V cores will have to implement many 'optional' extension to become competitive.
>if RISC-V is to become competitive it will have to become much more complex as well.
Yes, by CISC dogmatism, I was referring to this.
>blatantly refusing to accept simplicity has inherent value
With a touch of CISC propaganda:
>seems to be stuck in the 90s and the distinction is pretty much irrelevant at this point
Thankfully, you won't have to wait too long, now.
RISC-V got on-par feature-wise with x86 and ARM, as of December 2021, while keeping itself simple.
>RISC-V enables the best processors
The very high performance implementations of RVA22+V will begin to appear as soon as next year. And that'll be the end of it.
>RISC-V is inevitable.
Anyone who knows what they're talking about will tell you the same thing. If you don't want to listen to me then listen to Jim Keller. Or ARM star designer (ARM7TDMI, Thumb2, among others) David Jaggar.
So they might well hit June 2022 M2 performance, or thereabouts.
Sure, M1 or M2 class RISC-V hitting the market in 2026 or 2027 is hitting an old performance mark and Apple will have moved on.
Even if not the absolutely fastest thing in the world at that point, M1 performance in 2027 is still going to be a totally usable machine for most people for most purposes. I'm typing this on an M1 Mac Mini I bought in November 2020 and I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon.
You can make whatever comparison you want between M1/M2 and x86.
Wouldn't they need to implement a bunch of additional extensions which RISC-V doesen't currently have just to reach feature parity? That alone would've introduced significant delays.
Also it took Apple 8 or so years to build a competitive desktop/laptop CPU. They released their first custom ARM core in 2012 and likely relied a lot on what they learned while working with Cortex so it's not like they started completely from scratch.
And we're talking about Apple, very few if any other companies are willing to invest as much time and resources into a product targeting a stagnant or even shrinking market (desktops/laptops) with very low margins. I don't think Qualcomm can't design something that would be competitive with M1/2 they probably don't just see a lot of sense in that financially. How would RISC-V change this?
Of course there are political reasons for Chinese companies (being increasingly cutoff from western tech to invest into RISC-V) which might be more important than financial ones. So a shift to RISC-V would be almost guaranteed to increase our reliance on China which in no way could be viewed as something positive...
> I can see absolutely no reason to replace it any time soon.
And presumably you would be fine to replace it when as machine which is just as fast in 5 years just because it used a RISC-V CPU despite there being significantly faster ARM/x86 devices on the market?
Apple doesn't build or learn anything. The people they employ to work there do. When those people go to another company ... e.g. a RISC-V company ... they take that learning with them.
Near Zen5 (projected) performance shown in Tenstorrent slides. M2 is not anywhere near that. Apple would wish.
To directly compete with AMD/Intel they are going to have to be within the same ballpark of performance and cost about the same and consume about the same amount of power. There is simply no way in hell that is going to happen in 2024, not with the amount of catchup they have to do. Even Tenstorrent's own Jim Keller expects their Ascalon to be behind Zen 5 in raw performance / GHz, and Ventana's slides show it barely beating 2021 CPUs[1] which are in turn already massively outperformed by current-gen ones[2].
I fully expect a few RISC-V products to be only a generation or 2/3 behind within a couple of years, but that is simply not enough to be a direct competitor.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.00381.pdf
[1]: https://www.servethehome.com/ventana-veyron-v1-risc-v-data-c...
[2]: https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-bergamo-epyc-9754-clou...
It is the XuanTie C910 open source core. It has been available for many years.
I have no reason to question Jim Keller nor Wei-han Lien ability to deliver, with their proven track record of delivering.
Tenstorrent presentation late last year talked chiplet availability in 2024. That's the best estimate we can work with, for Tenstorrent specifically.
There's multiple other companies and cores we're aware of, and then the others we don't even know of.
e.g. Rivos has a strong team that's been silently cooking something for a very long time now. It could emerge at any time.
I haven't seen any news on since January, and no concrete shipping date. I signed up on the announcement email list and haven't seen anything there either (or at least I think I signed up; I don't even see an acknowledgement email.)
That's not really a criticism or doomsaying about Intel or SiFive from me -- I'm really interested to see what they have -- but they could do with a better communication strategy.