RISC-V is the Future – Jiachen Project | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V is the Future – Jiachen Project

rv2036.org

4 pointsravenical5 comments

So far, the main use case for RISC-V has been providing access to CPU technology for regimes under sanctions from developed countries (or preparing for such future sanctions). I find it quite unfortunate.

That's not true, for many reasons.

- RISC-V is heavily used in embedded applications everywhere, to the point that Arm has announced they're stopping developing the Cortex-M line and sticking with what they currently have

- at least in the case of China and Russia, they already have machines using ISAs they developed and own themselves with higher performance than currently-available RISC-V

- RISC-V is not a "CPU technology" (that is, CPU micro-architecture) or a chipmaking technology. It's just a language for writing recipes, and says nothing at all about the medium or technology used to record and distribute and follow those recipes.

- within the next 12-24 months, RISC-V chips designed and made in the West will match or exceed those designed in China as many top CPU designers joined or founded RISC-V companies around 2021/2 (and Intel's ex "Royal Core" team in 2024).

RISC-V is not a "CPU technology". It is an ISA.

I assume the primary "regime" you refer to here is China. What they have shown is that, if forced to, they are perfectly capable of producing their own domestic technologies and industries. Given that, I would vastly prefer them to use an open and sharable standard like RISC-V rather than to create a fully incompatible ecosystem that forces global supply chains to schism completely.

But of course the other "regimes" that are looking to RISC-V for independence are places like Europe and Canada. Were those the places you meant?

> the main use case for RISC-V has been providing access to CPU technology for regimes under sanctions

Here is a US based company that just raised another $400 million to push RISC-V in the datacenter. They claim to have ARM Neoverse N2 performance in US datacenters already.

https://www.sifive.com/blog/investing-in-our-next-chapter-of...

Here is NASA standardizing on chips from the same company:

https://www.sifive.com/press/nasa-selects-sifive-and-makes-r...

And here are the Chinese Zhenwu 810E RISC-V chips for AI training and inference and the XuanTie C950 chips for cloud servers.

Uniquely, RISC-V chips are avaiable regardless of which team you decide are the bad guys. And, after decades of reliance on an ecosystem, if your RISC-V supplier becomes erratic, unreliable, and unethical you can source your RISC-V tech somewhere else or even create your own. With any other ISA, you are stuck.

yes, the more choices we have the better

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