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Comment by ColdStream | Hacker News Reader

It was a decent little talk this one. Now that we are seeing RVA23 chips available we are starting to at least see a lot of software packages actively compiled for the platform. They aren't optimized much at all but they do run.

I am cautiously optimistic about the future of RISC-V. It is likely to start biting at the heals of ARM in another 5 years or so, and having no licensing fees makes it very attractive in that sense. Qualcomm and Apple will be very interesting in avoiding as many ARM licensing fees as possible even if initially in embedded systems. But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM and so it might not be so great for the end users. Time will tell.

All I know is that I look for the seeing Apple Silicon 2 launching in 2036 using this stuff. ;)

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5 years ago there was a req on the Apple job site for engineers familiar with RISC-V.

https://riscv.org/blog/apple-exploring-risc-v-hiring-risc-v-...

It would be more surprising if Apple wasn't exploring RISC-V - even if only for use in auxiliary chips.

tbf apple does a bunch of embedded programming too

Can you elaborate on

> But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM

Many of the underlying IP areas of RISK-V advanced features are not public implementations.

Yet there are still a lot of great projects around, that may end up in China grey market chip fabs (C950) at some point.

https://github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex

ARM64/AArch64 is about constrained consistency, but most RISCV standards groups still fail to recognize their ISA version fragmentation was a serious mistake. So no, it won't exist outside niche use-cases until the kids stop arguing over what RISCV even means in a general end-user context (BOOM flags, RVA23, etc.) =3

We still have to see a RISC-V implementation that comes even close to the performance of ARM

They are still a LONG way from parity in terms of performance per watt. Best I have seen is about 1/6th as efficient. But this seems to be an issue of no current chips are what you would consider even remotely high end in terms of the groups working on them and the manufacturing nodes they are using.

But there is a lot of progress in space and it appears to be picking up pace. The only issue is that it risks becoming very fragmented.

Rivos was competitive. Sadly bought by Meta and "disappeared" into the company.

I thought Apple has a special deal with ARM as they were an early investor?

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