Where would I go about buying a serious risc-v PC? So far, all I've seen are either tiny devices without much computation power, or emulation support.
Is risc-v a legitimate platform for serious computation or is it targeted at embedded devices?
Is risc-v a legitimate platform for serious computation or is it targeted at embedded devices?
Serious compute simply takes far longer in terms of product cycle and the relevant standard came far later.
A lot of use for RISC-V is also not in places that is target at end consumer devices.
There is not much yet in terms of RISC-V PC? The HiFive Pro P550 should be coming out at some point. Or the Unmatched currently.
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550
Companies working on high performance RISC-V are: Esperanto, SiFive, Ventana Micro Systems and Tenstorrent.
In general, the RISC-V Vector Unit has very much been designed to make those workloads faster. Many new AI/ML companies are using RISC-V and Vectors but usually with some of their own non-standard stuff.
Esperanto has Vectors with TPU. TensTorrent has done a lot of work on software to use their chip as a dataflow engine. And so on and so on.
So essentially, Nvida is making a huge amount of money and all those companies will want a piece of it.
I would say RISC-V Vector is a better design then x86 SIMD.
RISC-V is also not done, there are efforts to standardize things like matrix and other things used for AI/ML workloads.
If you want a cheap, low-end single board computer you can use right now, then I'd go for either the Vision Five 2 or the Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A. Performance won't be that great, but it'll run Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or Yocto distros pretty much out of the box. I'm working on a Hifive Unmatched vs VF2 vs Sipeed vs Raspberry Pi 4B performance comparison right now, which will appear on https://rwmj.wordpress.com
For most development smaller SBCs are enough, and I'd recommend waiting for RVA22/23 profile supporting hardware before spending a lot of money, because most current chips use the non standard vector isa and don't support all profile extensions, because they where created before everything was ratified.
Tenstorrent Ascalon (led by who was Apple M1 lead architect) promises competitive performance with projected AMD Zen5, and is due 2024 (same as Zen5).
I personally thought that Microsoft was going to abandon x86 for ARM in 2017 because it means they can lock the platform down even further with applications only being installable from their proprietary store and the bootloader being locked to windows only. Six years later nothing happened. ARM is on its deathbed.
* There aren't really any available for a reasonable price.
* A lot of the desktop related stuff is still in the process of being specified and ratified. If you buy something now it will probably use a load of ad-hoc features especially for booting.
* It doesn't really make any difference to running software, unless you are writing assembly. If you just want to play around with RISC-V assembly an emulator or cheap embedded hardware is a lot better option.
They are serious about upstream support[0].