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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

What RISC-V needs to take off, IMO, is laptop/workstation solutions. I believe what has given ARM a huge leg up in terms of development mindpower is Apple's M1. Ideally for RISC-V, there'd be an apple product with it inside. Barring that, you are basically asking for new software for RISC-V to be developed on non-risc-v devices. That can work, but I think it really slows down adoption.

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There are a few, but there hasn't really been high enough performance SoCs/cores to make them worthwhile. Framework has a RISC-V based motherboard in the works, but it has less compute power than a Raspberry Pi 4 (JH7110) so it's of marginal use as an everyday machine. I think it will just take time, a lot of time, for RISC-V to get to the same spot that ARM is in now, but I am optimistic that it will get there.

Multiple companies have Apple M1 level RISC-V cores designed and announced and ready for chip makers to license, including Akeana which came out of stealth mode a couple of days ago.

It only remains for someone to design these cores into an SoC, manufacture it, and get it onto boards and into the market, a process that typically in the past has taken around 3-4 years but may be accelerating. Keep an eye out around 2026-2027.

Meanwhile, we'll have early Core i3/i5/i7 level performance in RISC-V SBCs by this time next year (the manufacturer is saying Q1, but I don't quite believe that), but with a lot more cores. That's leapfrogging over Pi 5, Rock 5, Orange Pi 5, which is already a pretty usable machine.

The spacemiT K1/M1 SoC is the best that you can get now. The CPUs implement RVA22+V, which is the newest spec available in hardware.

There is:

- Banana Pi BPi-F3[0][1], a SBC.

- Milk-V Jupiter[2][3], a mini-ITX board.

- DC Roma II [4][5], a laptop.

Performance-wise, each core in this SoC is between that of Rpi 3b+ and Rpi 4, and there's 8 of them.

By 2025Q1, Milk-V Oasis[6] is expected, with 16x SiFive P670 (Zen1-tier IPC) and 8x X280.

Late 2025, it should be possible to buy something with P870 (the next gen).

RISC-V is catching up with the top performers very quickly.

0. https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZGryhBnkV0

2. https://milkv.io/jupiter

3. https://youtu.be/YxtFctEsHy0

4. https://deepcomputing.io/product/dc-roma-risc-v-laptop-ii/

5. https://youtu.be/3mhd98AGNXQ

6. https://community.milkv.io/t/introducing-the-milk-v-oasis-wi...

This is what I had hoped horse creek/horse canyone was going to be before it was killed off. The board also needs a stable/updating linux distro like raspberry pi os is along with VS Code and language server support.

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