Why is RISC-V significant? I’m completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Open standard CPU instruction set. Meaning people can design new chips for it without needing to enter an expensive license agreement.
I would have thought the license agreement would be one of the least expensive parts of making modern high-performance chips.
Quite the opposite. Well, sort of.
It’s easy to get a licence, you just need money. Lots of money.
That’s if you can get a licence. Intel only licensed to AMD because the USA military requires two vendors.
ARM charges an, err, arm and a leg.
Because it’s an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, …) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
And Apple will get to do a fourth architecture migration
*fifth
I’m not really counting the 6502, since I don’t think Apple ever bothered with emulation or backwards compatibility for it once they moved to 68000.
I thought their old PowerPc architecture was risc
Because we’re getting risc one way or another and the two targets are risc-v and arm. All the phones, tablets, mini pcs and apple made the jump to either arm or risc-v.
Really really glad for this. Can’t wait for next LMDE release. 😊😄🥹
HELL YEAH BROTHER LETS GOOO
This is great!
The problem isn’t really the software, but rather GPU drivers/MESA. There are ubuntu ports for many boards, but without GPU acceleration.
I purchased a LicheePi 4A from Sipeed and it’s really a good news for me.
