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Comment by hcnews | Hacker News Reader

OOTL here. Are there any major phones which implement RISC-V? Also, does this require across the stack changes? i.e. not just OS ones.

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Not yet, but they're coming down the pipe.

> Also, does this require across the stack changes? i.e. not just OS ones.

I'm not sure where you draw the boundary between 'stack' and 'os'. Can you expand a bit?

> but they're coming down the pipe.

Do you have any links? I'm curious, and not a little bit skeptical about the near-term competitiveness of RISC-V in the mobile space.

Also, who would potentially be building it? Unless you tell me Samsung has a five-year roadmap, I am skeptical.

Chinese companies? they are working hard to get away from US proprietary tech.

Probably the same companies that contributed the initial Android RISC-V port.

Every hardware company makes some plans that far ahead because the pipeline is so long. Details of course change a lot up to about 18-24 months before release but general direction must be known way earlier.

There were some HN frontpage submissions on Qualcomm's RISC-V SOC a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924092

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37919907

It doesn't exactly sound imminent.

> It doesn't exactly sound imminent.

Mostly Chinese companies have been very busy designing & manufacturing actual silicon. And prices for such products have come down a lot, too.

It wouldn't surprise me if at some point there's RISC-V based phones, tablets & other devices on Chinese market, that most people outside China simply don't know about.

Or that teardown of a cheap phone sold in say, India, turns out to have a RISC-V SoC inside without much public attention beforehand.

Probably sooner than later. RISC-V is bound to become a lowest common denominator for computing devices especially at the low end. Picked by default unless <insert specific requirement here>.

Android being ported is a logical consequence of this.

It's gonna be cheap risc-v Chinese phones for a while. And they'll get faster and faster every six months. But they'll stay cheap. Until even Samsung can't compete and stops making phones, like LG did.

A couple of weeks ago SiFive announced a new core, the P870, which is in ARM Cortex-X3 class. That's the biggest core in the latest Snapdragon Gen 8 chips.

It typically takes 2-3 years from core announcement to being in an SoC for a high end phone.

They are coming.

Arm will have something newer by then, of course, but a 2023 flagship Galaxy S23 is not going to look stupid in 2026.

Nope. Qualcomm does have smartwatch RISC-V processors in the pipeline. It's not nothing?

Haven't tried the AOSP port for the LiCheePi 4a yet. Probably should give it a whirl just to see if things just work.

That's easier just to try downloading Minecraft through the Play Store than boot strapping the entire toolchain needed to get PolyMC working.

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