What about POWER?
There's this RISC-V dream about an high performance CPU with a fleshed out, open source ISA, with a company championing it with a big proven core you can buy, and decent compiler support in place... but we already have it! Its right over there!
Also, I think POWER is a bad omen. If IBM can't sustain POWER's hype (even with good CPUs you can buy right now), I'm not sure how RISC-V is supposed to surpass that from square one.
I don't want to hate on RISC-V, but I just don't see a line from here to where ARM is now, even with ARM's shenanigans.
Other countries (like Russia, and China's MIPs thing) have pursued novel architectures for higher power general purpose computing, but its mostly for government use I think. China pulling off a societal transition to RISC-V would be quite a coup.
I think the main problem of POWER today is that you can't get a "Raspi sized" development board, while you can easily get all kinds of ARM based SBCs as well as various RISC-V based SBCs. The smallest POWER system you can get right now is iirc a workstation from Raptor which essentially competes with Xeon workstations, if you don't want to play around with soft cores on FPGAs.
- https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation/a2i
I don't understand why. RISC-V is being used and pushed by 1000s of companies at this point. You can license cores from 100+ vendors or you can make your own.
There are lots of companies pushing it into every single part of the market. There are well kown cores for space travel, the next generation is RISC-V. RISC-V is already in plenty of low level cores, in things like SSDs, NICs and so on. Companies like Andes push it into billions of consumer devices.
In terms of the ISA itself it is already a match or better then ARM in most ways. And in 1-2 years with the next rounds of specs, it will be more advanced.
To me it seems like RISC-V is already winning by far and its just a question of time. This is more like Linux in the late 90s vs commercial Unix.
But there is basically no reason to pick POWER over RISC-V at this stage. Not unless you are already invested in the POWER architecture.
RISC-V has far more OpenSource work, far more companies involved, the spec is driven and improved by a lot of people and so on.
The reality is most work on RISC-V doesn't go into super high performance stuff and if its there, then usually along side high performance AI stuff. SiFive, Esperanto, Tenstorrent and so on.
> I'm not sure how RISC-V is supposed to surpass that from square one.
Buy having 100x more companies working on it.