This Year, RISC-V Laptops Arrive | Hacker News Reader

This Year, RISC-V Laptops Arrive

spectrum.ieee.org

> The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known to all.

Maybe silly question: the ISA has no license fee or restrictions, but does RISC-V also somehow imply that the microarchitecture will be open? (like in a GPL-style way or something?) Maybe the one in the article is open, but does RISC-V actually make that more likely in the future?

Not that a license-free ISA would be pointless otherwise, but the article feels misleading if it's possible to have closed RISC-V designs

> does RISC-V also somehow imply that the microarchitecture will be open?

Not at all. Most are completely proprietary.

And that's fine. We're likely to end up with dozens of companies competing to license you their RISC-V cores, and lots of open source designs ranging from not very good to just a couple of years behind the commercial ones.

A much better situation than having just one vendor that can go out of business or simply decide to do something else at any time (see DEC, MIPS, Sun, Intel with iPX 432, i860, i960, Itanium, ...). Or even Intel and AMD with x86. Or Arm, Apple (not selling cores or chips to 3rd parties, only finished computers), Qualcomm (being sued by Arm) in the Arm ecosystem.

Yeah, that's what I expected. Which doesn't negate RISC-V's value, but does mean the original article said some misleading things

> RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) poised to make personal computing more, well, personal

Eerrr, how exactly? RISC-V is poised to make companies not pay the ARM fee. That's it.

Did you even read the article?

Starting with the opening paragraph

> BURIED IN THE INNER workings of your laptop is a secret blueprint, dictating the set of instructions the computer can execute and serving as the interface between hardware and software. The instructions are immutable and hidden behind proprietary technology. But starting in 2025, you could buy a new and improved laptop whose secrets are known to all. That laptop will be fully customizable, with both hardware and software you’ll be able to be modified to fit your needs.

ending with the closing paragraph

> ”If we can open up even the chip design, then one day, even students at schools and universities can come into class and design their own chips, with open tools,” says Liang. “With openness, you can choose to build things yourself from zero.”

Of course students (or other individuals) already can design their own CPU cores and chips, for not all that much money. They're just not as high MHz as the big boys.

It's easy to run your own RISC-V core at 50 or 100 MIPS in a cheap FPGA.

You can make a custom chip for $150 at TinyTapeout. A pretty small chip, but you can fit a simple RISC-V cpu in if you use multiple tiles.

https://tinytapeout.com/runs/tt05/tt_um_kianV_rv32ima_uLinux...

It boots (noMMU) Linux:

https://x.com/splinedrive/status/1874225296335134867/photo/1

A great point. And until we're seeing the "high MHz (like) the big boys" who will want a $1000 laptop that runs as slow as an $80 raspberry pi 5?

People who are writing software to be ready for the fast hardware when it arrives? And want to do it anywhere, on a laptop with nice case, keyboard screen etc, not a $300 lower quality laptop?

> as slow as an $80 raspberry pi 5

The current Framework board is similar to an Arm A55 e.g. Odroid C4, somewhere between Pi 3 and Pi 4. More like Pi 4 in practical terms because Pi 3 only has 1 GB RAM which is extremely restricting, while current RISC-V boards can take 8 or 16 GB -- or 32 GB on the Milk-V Megrez and SiFive HiFive P550 which are probably a bit faster than a Pi 4, other than not having SIMD.

That lets you do serious work, even if not quite as fast as one might like.

Something comparable to the Pi 5 needs to wait another 12 months maybe. Deep Computing are talking about making one late this year in the article.

Well, I stand corrected for that massive and lucrative risc-V software developer market "waiting for the fast hardware" this is for you.

No one said anything about massive and lucrative.

The small market is a major reason for the high price -- limited units to recoup the development cost from.

It's a chicken and egg thing, and you have to start the cycle somewhere, assuming you want to actually do something new, not just make internet posts.

The same goes for FrameWork itself, even the Intel and AMD ones.

Although likely to be way off the point, I'm reminded of the poor image that electric cars had before Tesla - that they were basically revved up golf carts.

Someone needs to find a "tesla of risc-v chips" that's insanely fast, even if its a premium price. Once the image is shaken, we can move into commodity chips.

But I guess we have the (slow) golf cart for now.

I wonder if the processors in the new laptops need many seconds to initialize themselves after they are powered on like Intel processors do.

Seems to me that a lot of people would buy a cheap laptop that is ready to use within a few seconds of being turned on. (Maybe the web browser requires more time, but the user can start writing something down after just 2 seconds.)

I wonder if the processors in the new laptops need many seconds to initialize themselves after they are powered on like Intel processors do.

GitHub Actions doesn't even support arm64 compilation yet for Linux. Without good support from GitHub, open source compilation and adoption for diverse platforms struggles.

GitHub Actions supports running docker, so you can run docker for arm64 / riscv etc (which uses qemu under the hood)

    - name: Run ARM container
      run: |
        docker run --platform linux/arm64 my-image:arm-latest

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