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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs aside, it's hard as an enthusiast consumer to get excited about RISC-V for the same reason it's hard to get excitrd about ARM. Availability is limited to prepackaged SBCs and tinkering-discouraged consumer products.

I'd be so excited if I could buy a chip and a motherboard and just drop them into a standard ATX case. But I don't think there exists a consumer-purchaseable RISC-V or ARM chip that isn't a whole system on a chip.

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ATX boards exist but are not cost effective. The economies of scale of the x64 ecosystem make it impossible to beat. Are you really interested in a 1500$ board and CPU combo that runs slower than an average Best Buy laptop? AMD and Intel are incredibly _cheap_ for the power you get.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-...

https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-mothe...

I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture, since I'm not sure what, if anything, would be noticeably improved or different to me.

Unless it's for curiosity, then that makes sense to me.

The only thing Apple Silicon improved on is battery life/power consumption/thermals and yet there are lots of people who think it's better across the board despite faster x86 chips existing on the market.

I think excitement about architecture among end users is often not based in reality as the whole point of operating systems and high level languages is to abstract it all away.

> I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture,

Why are people into ham radio or trains or mechanical watches? Some people just find stuff neat.

I don't have any practical use for a RISC-V mobo that an x64 system couldn't handle. I just think it's cool. It excites me.

The RISC-V instruction set is not encumbered by intellectual property. This means they are cheaper to make, licensing costs being 0. Cheaper to make can translate to the customer into cheaper to buy.

That is definitely going to be nice, but not enough for me to really care too much about it now vs things that actually affect me like software tools, languages, etc.

Are you saying that you don't pay for your hardware so it doesn't affect you? If not, sorry for the misunderstanding.

Yep Intel just gives me free hardware LOL, yeah, no...

So anyway, the reason is whenever risc-v makes sense to switch to for cost and performance, I think I'll do it at that time. There is no reason I can see for me to think about it until then. Literally it's going to be exactly the same for me except maybe doing something like `apt install somepkg-risc-v` for some packages and I'm pretty sure that will be the only thing different for me.

Makes sense now or still confused?

AMD & Intel also pay $0 for licensing costs. For the phone markets & up through servers, licensing costs are a rounding error on what you pay. You're paying for the R&D of actually designing the chip itself, not the ISA, as well as for the actual manufacturing itself.

Forgive me, but I don't understand how you can acknowledge that you do pay for ISA licensing and then contradict that in the next sentence.

> You're paying for [...], not the ISA

If you're comparing between two products and one is $1500 and the other is $1501, is that $1 really entering your list of pros/cons? No, of course not. It's irrelevant at that point, literally any other difference (even what color the dumb thing is) is immediately more significant. That's my point, there's a point at which the increased end-price as a result of the licensing is such a small % of the total price as to simply no longer be significant for the consumer buying the product. And phones are already expensive enough that the SoC being 1-2% more expensive simply doesn't matter in any meaningful degree to the end purchase price. Nobody is looking at the $1200 iPhone 15 Pro Max and going "damn, if only this was $0.50 cheaper, then it'd be all over it..."

Consumer devices with ARM cores can be had for as low as 2 USD (sensors, breakout boards). Phones can be had for Rs 1300 (around 15$):

https://pricebaba.com/mobile/pricelist/low-cost-phones-in-in...

Sadly, it's impossible to estimate the relative cost without knowing the ISA licensing terms, and I haven't been able to find anything.

> Consumer devices with ARM cores can be had for as low as 2 USD (sensors, breakout boards).

Yes, and that is the market where RISC-V is actually appealing. Once you go higher end, the appeal of a no license cost ISA rapidly drops off and stops being a significant factor.

This seems to assume that development of ISAs is done for free, which is not the case.

When a firm pays Arm a licensing fee for the Arm ISA that fee helps support the development of the Arm ISA.

When someone who works for SiFive or Tenstorrent etc works on the development of the RISC-V ISA, they are being paid and those costs will be recovered through the price paid for the products they sell. Others may use the ISA at zero cost but someone is paying.

Now you could argue that costs will be lower in aggregate because of greater competition, but the cost isn't zero in total.

This does include a presumption, but not the one that you're proposing: that the ISA development is done for cheaper than when a single profit-driven entity is responsible for it.

It might be cheaper but licensing costs = 0 does not imply that, which is what your original statement said.

I'll say upfront that you are right; developers getting excited about new architectures generally does not make sense.

But here is why I'm excited about RISC-V: I write my software in C, and I want it to be as portable as possible. RISC-V is something different that will exercise new issues when my code is tested on it.

It's a dumb reason, yes. But I want a 32-bit chip and a 64-bit chip for testing. I want to have a server rack full of different chips with different architectures, RISC-V included, and set up a commit pipeline that kicks off a massive test suite on all of the VM's on those machines, running different OS's.

I want to test my code on hundreds of OS/arch platform sets.

RISC-V is a different architecture with different things. I want it.

x86 has turned assembly into voodoo while RISC-V is very simple to understand and teach. This is true at the basic level, but is also true for something like vectors vs AVX where one is quite easy to teach while the other is massively complex. More devs who can do this means we get more higher-performance code for cheaper. This will be a very important milestone for software.

Also leaving aside this post, solidrun's honeycomb boards are a mini itx form factor that is ARM SystemReady. You can run windows on arm on it, and it has UEFI if you want that, meaning no need for a BSP. Have booted several Linux distributions on it.

It's limited ports wise (has a single nvme slot, but a ton of networking) and if you want to use it for a desktop you need to replace the noisy fan that comes with it. But I can actually be done.

It's the only board I'm aware of though.

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