I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying.
That said, this is the year.
The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year.
> The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5
Don't set your self up for dissapointment.
Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower.
Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of)
PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
> to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary.
It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale.
The license cost of the ISA is not that much per chip. It is not nearly enough to equal the extra cost per unit that is going to be added to any upcoming RISC-V chip due to the small production runs compared to x86-64 or ARM.
On the microcontroller side, we are seeing what you are saying. RISC-V has taken over the microcontroller world and chips are being produced in the billions. Scale, combined with the lack of licensing, means that you can get RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of bucks.
The other thing is that there will still be license fees for RISC-V. You are not paying RISC-V International. But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Instead of paying ARM, you will be paying SciFive, or SpaceMIT or Andes, or Tenstorrent, or UltraRISC (for the Titan board this story is about).
But compare this to ARM where your choices are licensing from ARM or purchasing hardware from Qualcomm or Apple. Or compare to x86-86 where there is only Intel and AMD to choose from. There will be dozens of RISC-V suppliers and competition will drive innovation up and prices down.
Of course, you can of course always design your own! Or use an Open Source design. No license fees required. But the chips you will actually want to use as a consumer will probably come with licensing fees.
But 3-5 years from now, things may be different. I hope and believe that RISC-V will be successful. As RISC-V chips with competitive performance appear, volumes will go up and we will see the same pattern we have seen in microcontrollers. Many of the niches that are currently filled by ARM will start to be filled by RISC-V. This will include the SBC space and the server space for sure. We may see tablets and phones. With luck, it will also start to fill the periphery of the laptop and desktop space. Prices will be higher at first and then come down.
RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
> I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale.
Yes. That's exactly my concern too. That can be expected to last until RISC-V application processors are a few magnitudes of order more popular. But it isn't as improbable as it sounds. Just a matter of time.
> But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid.
Yes, that will be the licensing cost of the proprietary IP, excluding the hardware costs.
> RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
I hope so too. I'm just saying that it's too early to celebrate right now. It will probably take another half a decade as you mentioned.
That should demonstrate sufficient performance for building products around it, and is ultimately one of many RVA23 options that will show up in chips this year.
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.
The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
Well, today it is only Ubuntu 25.10 and newer that require RVA23. Almost everything else will run on plain old RV64GC which this board handles no problem.
But you are correct that once RVA23 chips begin to appear, everybody will move to it quite quickly.
RVA23 provides essentially the same feature-set as ARM64 or x86-64v4 including both virtualization and vector capabilities. In other words, RVA23 is the first RISC-V profile to match what modern applications and workflows require.
The good news is that I expect this to remain the minimum profile for quite a long time. Even once RVA30 and future profiles appear, there may not be much pressure for things like Linux distributions to drop support for RVA23. This is a lot like the modern x86-64 space where almost all Linux distributions work just fine on x86-64 v1 even though there are now v2, v3, and v4 available as well. You can run the latest edition of Arch Linux on hardware from 2005. It is hard to predict the future but it would not surprise me if Ubuntu 30.04 LTS ran just fine on RISC-V hardware released later this year.
But ya, anything before RVA23, like the RVA22 Titan we are discussing here, will be stuck forever on older distros or custom builds (like Ubuntu 25.04).
I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.
Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.
Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
To add a 2x20 pin (IDE ribbon cable) interface like a Pi: add a USB-to-2x20 pin board, use an RP2040/RP2350 (Pi Pico (uf2 bootloader) over serial over USB or Bluetooth or WiFi; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks.
Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board?
The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling.
For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.
Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.
I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.
The number of companies creating RISC V implementations is pretty hopeful. There's way more competition here than x64 or ARM, and that could yield some interesting results.
It matters in that it opens up competition and allows fully-open designs, which should keep prices low and products available, but you're right that having fully-open state-of-the-art chips is unlikely to happen any time soon.
in fact, such ISA is only going to fuel more closed ecosystems as it made hundreds of Chinese vendors to join the game for free, they all suddenly got the chance to build their totally closed platforms.
Which makes the whole ecosystem a lot more open. None of those suppliers is going to have the market power to lock you in. You can get it from the lowest cost provider until something higher value comes along.
And if you are a country, nobody can kill your RISC-V ecosystem. Worst case, you have to design your own chips but at least all the software exists and is established. And Ooen Source cores exist and are getting better. They may not be bleeding edge but they could be good enough if push came to shove. The BOOM chip just got vector extensions.
I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things
If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.
For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.
And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).
It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.
Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.
High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.
This is a bold prediction but I thing “alliances” will form where industry players collaborate (like we are seeing in video codecs). And the basic core could become an Open Source project just like Linux did. Operating Systems and codecs were (and are) expensive too.
But there are different levels of proprietary. Having your entire software ecosystem impossible to lock-in means something. And competition tends to breed openness.
MIPS certainly did gain a lot of traction. It was a real force at one point and the world is awash in them. But of course MIPS (the company) is RISC-V now.
An operating system can be coded on one not particularly powerful computer by one person and it costs a few pennies to compile and test. A lot of other open source projects were also initiated by one or two talented people. Software is absurdly inexpensive to develop relative to its complexity.
A cutting edge processor requires personnel across several disciplines and millions in specialized equipment to both validate the implementation of the architecture and the electrical behavior of the circuits and each time it's "compiled" (a batch of test chips fabbed and QAed), it takes a few weeks to be delivered and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ISA being open and royalty-free doesn't affect any of those massive costs.
To use a famous quote: "The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they...' is almost always, 'Money'" Nobody is offering up that kind of money without practical guarantees of success and some kind of profit at the end of it.
> Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.
you need to be totally autistic to believe that Chinese vendors are going to share anything meaningful with you. they don't hate you, they want their paying customers to be happy, but the brutal competitions in China doesn't allow them to be open in any sense. For products like RISC-V processors and MCUs, the moat is extremely low, being open leads to quick death. It is not about how much stuff they share with you as paying customer, it is about how much they are willing to share with their competitors when there are hundreds of companies trying everything to survive.
as a developer, you just need to ask yourself a dead simple question - how such risc-v platforms are going to be more open than raspberry pi.
I have increasingly negative things to say about this.
There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.
This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.
Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.
I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!
I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!
Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.
> Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.
As you note correctly, the ISA is open, not this CPU (or board).
The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it. This CPU can then be open (i.e. you providing the RTL, etc.), if you so desire
I assume it will be much more difficult (or impossible?) to provide the RTL for a CPU with an AMD64 ISA, since that one has to be licensed. I wonder if you paying for the license allows you to share your implementation with the world. Even if it does, it's less likely that you will do so, given that you will have to pay for the licensing fee and make your money back
Since there is no license to pay for in case of RISC-V, it allows you to open up the design of your CPU without you having to pay for that privilege
My superficial understanding is that arm does not prevent from sharing implementation details of your own design but most chips also license a starting implementation that has such limitations. So the end result is often more restricted than the ISA licence some would require
Most ARM licensees aren't permitted to create custom implementations, only to use IP cores provided by ARM. There are a couple of companies who do have an architectural license, allowing them to create their own implementations, but there are only a few of those and they aren't likely to share. (It's also possible that the terms of their license prohibit them from making their designs public.)
The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it.
So? You've been able to do that since...computers. Anyone can roll their own ISA any time they want. It's a low-effort project that someone with maybe a Masters student level of knowledge can do competently. When I was in school, we even had a class where you would cook up an (simple) ISA and implement it (2901 bit-slice processors); these days they use FPGAs.
So you got your own processor for your own ISA...that was slow, expensive (no economy of scale) and without a market. But very fun, and open source, at least. And if "create your own CPU that implements it" is what you want, go forth and conquer...everything you need is already there and has been for a long time.
But if your goal is "I want an open source ISA that I can produce that's price and/or performance competitive with the incumbents", well, that's a totally different ballgame.
And there are open source ISAs that have been around for decades (SPARC, POWER, SuperH). These are ISAs that already have big chunks of ecosystem already in place. The R&D around how to make them competitive already exists. Some, like LEON SPARC have even gone into something like production (and flown in space).
So, yes, an open source ISA affords the possibility that we can make processors based on our own ISAs on our own terms. It has even in extremely rare occasions produced a product. But the fact remains, the market hasn't cared in the slightest to invest what's required to turn that advantage into a real competitor to the incumbent processors.
Yes, you can create your own ISA. But to run what software?
If I create my own RISC-V implementation, I can install Ubuntu on it. Maybe even Steam.
See the difference?
And, the market has responded with a tidal wave of CPU contenders. Like in the rest of the world, not all of them target the highest end portion of the market. But some are choosing to play there. Have you checked-out Ascalon?
And why did Qualcomm pay all that money for Ventana recently? You do not expect them to release high-end RISC-V chips? I mean, they already ship many low-end ones.
Couldn't have said it better. The moments these people promise everything would be free is a massive red flag. Unfortunately it seems most poodle haven't learned the lesson.
with the majority players being Chinese vendors (those you can buy, not including those building RISC-V for their own in-house applications), RISC-V is far less open than ARM or x64.
expecting openness from Chinese vendors is like trying to hook up with some virgin bar girls in your favourite gogo bar in Bangkok.
if you search their public media releases, they mentioned that their cores are used by some imaginary vendors for undisclosed platforms. just go and check how CLOSE those junks are. product names and models are always omitted, it is always "certain vendor", "one AI card", no spec no details whatsoever...
searching their names on taobao.com returns 0 hit, searching their names on the largest Chinese second hand platform returns 0 hit. 4 years after they started doing their great open project, you can't even buy one from the OPEN market! that is VERY OPEN to me.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
Similarly, RISC-V as an ISA and an ecosystem will be uniquely scalable. The same basic ISA can be used on the smallest micro-controllers or the most complex AI supercomputers. And it can be used in the support chips every step of the way. The expertise that I acquire using RISC-V will be broadly applicable over space and time.
And, while this is a prediction, RISC-V will have longevity. Suppliers can go out of business. RISC-V is not a supplier. Once it takes hold, it is not going anywhere. Many an ISA has dominated the computing landscape only to be abandoned and forgotten. RISC-V was inspired by MIPS (the ISA) and MIPS workstations used to cost as much as a small house. But now MIPS (the company) is a RISC-V supplier. x86-64 may seem unassailable but ARM has certainly kept it out of many niches and now ARM is starting to be credible on desktops and servers. x86-64 could go away (especially if Intel failed--not impossible). And ARM is very vulnerable to RISC-V (if you ask me). But for RISC-V to go away, there would have to be yet another totally open ISA that the entire world rallied behind. That is not how things generally work. Like Linux, RISC-V is destined to become a natural monopoly in my view and to be with us a very, very, very long time.
And, for now at least, RISC-V is just more interesting. Companies like Tenstorrent are doing really interesting things. Universities are doing interesting work and sharing it with the world. Those two things came together just the other day when RISC-V vector extensions were added to BOOM. It is a fun space to watch and it will be a fun space to be a part of.
And just like every school teaches software in Java, every school is going to teach programming and electronics with RISC-V. It is going to be the default technology in the future. And that means that it will be the go-to for start-ups as well. RISC-V will be the go-to technology for innovation.
Finally, what I will end with is that the real inevitability of RISC-V has nothing to do with users. Companies will choose RISC-V. But not to save a few bucks on ISA licensing like everybody imagines. That may be a benefit but it does that amount of cost is not going to drive most decisions. But the more critical issue with licensing is control.
Take the situation with ARM and Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants to release its own high-performance silicon to compete with the likes of Intel and Apple. They licensed the ARM ISA to do this. And then ARM tried to stop them from releasing this technology over a license dispute. Yes, it was over money (which matters) but the much bigger deal is that ARM (a supplier to Qualcomm) tried to dictate how Qualcomm can run its business. Qualcomm recently bought a prominent high-performance RISC-V designer. I think these facts are related.
If you bet your business on ARM, you better hope that ARM likes your strategy. If they do not, they may try to stop you. Why would Qualcomm want to create a business around ARM if ARM is going to represent a strategic risk like this? Why would Amazon or NVIDIA? Building the same business around RISC-V eliminates that risk. You do not have to ask permission for whatever you do with RISC-V. Nobody can file an injunction on a RISC-V supplier for using RISC-V.
This is why China is so into RISC-V. Even for them, it is not really to save on license costs. It is about reducing legal and geopolitical exposure. US sanctions led to ARM refusing to work with Chinese suppliers like Huawei. The US cannot sanction RISC-V as a technology. Fast forward to today and there are now many, many companies around the world rethinking their exposure to US based technology companies. There is a reason that RISC-V International is based in Switzerland even though RISC-V was invented in California. Europe is investing in home-grown RISC-V solutions. So is India. Tenstorrent came from Canada. Andes is out of Taiwan. It is not just China.
So, no need to downvote. But if you really think RISC-V has no benefits, the next 5 years are really going to confuse you.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
I have a couple of earlier RISC V systems that were advertised as nearly desktop performance: I always like unconventional systems, but cant find a reason to like these, they are much slower than similar priced arm systems, the software/hardware support is not as good, and the instruction set is also just not that interesting. Also once you run Linux, you are just running Linux, it is just like Linux only harder to install, and slower.
While your points are fair, whoever told you those system were “nearly desktop performance” was lying.
That said, this is the year.
The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5 (according to the guy who created that Architecture at AMD). It is aimed at servers initially but they say they will release their own silicon sometime in the first half of this year. Even if that is optimistic, sometime this year seems likely. They released the licensable IP last year.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3rtN8TTGf4&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
> The Tenstorrent Ascalon is supposed to be as fast as AMD Ryzen 5
Don't set your self up for dissapointment. Ascalon is supposed to match Zen5 performance per clock, but at 2.5GHz, so will still be at a minimum 2x slower.
Additionally, the announces Ascalon devboard is supposed to be on an older node and have an ever lower frequency due to that. (the 2.5GHz were on SF4X, the devboard may be on something like 12nm)
At the pace every PC component is becoming quite expensive it's not entirely out of the realm of possibilities that my next CPU will be RISC-V based. /s (kind of)
PS: for those still hesitating to tinker with RISC-V the workflow is becoming quite convenient already, to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
> to the point you can "just" boot and install Linux (as mentioned in the article) on it to get a headless server running in minutes.
This is basically what I've been waiting on. Besides the mentioned Milk-V Titan, what are some other good boards people here tried out and could vouch for being good? Ideally European, but happy to receive any recommendations as long as you've actually tried it yourself :)
My tinkerings https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/@utopiah/115332958192905605 so SpacemiT K1 8 core on BananaPi https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
Maybe the open/free part will help with slightly better prices.
What a sad world to live in, stochastic bullshit machines and exploding drones get more computers than I
You may know this already, but here's the obligatory clarification. The open/free part is the RISC-V ISA. The actual implementation, the microarchitecture IP, may not be. Most of the higher end RISC-V IPs are proprietary.
It may still have a slight price advantage compared to proprietary ISAs like ARM, due to the latter's ISA licensing costs. But it remains to be seen how much of this advantage will be passed to us, the end users.
I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale.
The license cost of the ISA is not that much per chip. It is not nearly enough to equal the extra cost per unit that is going to be added to any upcoming RISC-V chip due to the small production runs compared to x86-64 or ARM.
On the microcontroller side, we are seeing what you are saying. RISC-V has taken over the microcontroller world and chips are being produced in the billions. Scale, combined with the lack of licensing, means that you can get RISC-V microcontrollers for a couple of bucks.
The other thing is that there will still be license fees for RISC-V. You are not paying RISC-V International. But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid. Instead of paying ARM, you will be paying SciFive, or SpaceMIT or Andes, or Tenstorrent, or UltraRISC (for the Titan board this story is about).
But compare this to ARM where your choices are licensing from ARM or purchasing hardware from Qualcomm or Apple. Or compare to x86-86 where there is only Intel and AMD to choose from. There will be dozens of RISC-V suppliers and competition will drive innovation up and prices down.
Of course, you can of course always design your own! Or use an Open Source design. No license fees required. But the chips you will actually want to use as a consumer will probably come with licensing fees.
But 3-5 years from now, things may be different. I hope and believe that RISC-V will be successful. As RISC-V chips with competitive performance appear, volumes will go up and we will see the same pattern we have seen in microcontrollers. Many of the niches that are currently filled by ARM will start to be filled by RISC-V. This will include the SBC space and the server space for sure. We may see tablets and phones. With luck, it will also start to fill the periphery of the laptop and desktop space. Prices will be higher at first and then come down.
RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
> I am a pretty big RISC-V booster but RISC-V is going to cost way more for a while. It is simple economics of scale.
Yes. That's exactly my concern too. That can be expected to last until RISC-V application processors are a few magnitudes of order more popular. But it isn't as improbable as it sounds. Just a matter of time.
> But somebody designed the RISC-V chip and board you are buying and they will want to get paid.
Yes, that will be the licensing cost of the proprietary IP, excluding the hardware costs.
> RISC-V is inevitable. And the competition that will bring will pay dividends to all of us.
I hope so too. I'm just saying that it's too early to celebrate right now. It will probably take another half a decade as you mentioned.
>It will probably take another half a decade
Atlantis SoC/devboard, feat. Ascalon, is Q2.
That should demonstrate sufficient performance for building products around it, and is ultimately one of many RVA23 options that will show up in chips this year.
After that, economies of scale should kick in.
A number of distros have support for RISC-V: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, QEMU
conda-forge/conda-forge > "RISC-V Support?" https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io/issues/...
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:RISC-V
As things are now, I can only afford boards that take the RAM modules I inherited from my grandfather.
Luckily this board runs with old DDR4 sticks. If you still have some lying around good for you.
As far as I know, there's still no real RISC-V equivalent to Raspberry Pi, and I think that's what early adopters want the most.
The closest thing is probably Orange Pi RV2, but it has an outdated SoC with no RVA23 support, meaning some Linux distros won't even run on it. Its performance is also much poorer than of the RPi5.
The SpacemiT K3 with 8 SpacemiT X100 RVA23 cores, which are faster than Pi4 but slower than Pi5, should be available in a couple of months:
geekbench: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/16145076
rvv-bench: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/spacemit_x100/...
There are also 8 additional SpacemiT-A100 cores with 1024-bit wide vectors, which are more like an additional accelerator for number crunshing.
The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
> The Milk-V Titan has slightly faster scalar performance, than the K3.
So the main difference between this Milk-V Titan and the upcoming SpacemiT K3 is that the latter has better vector performance?
The Titan has no SIMD/Vector support at all, so it doesn't support RVA23.
The K3 is able to run RVA23 code, the Titan is not; it lacks V.
It matters, as the ecosystem settled on RVA23 as the baseline for application processors.
Well, today it is only Ubuntu 25.10 and newer that require RVA23. Almost everything else will run on plain old RV64GC which this board handles no problem.
But you are correct that once RVA23 chips begin to appear, everybody will move to it quite quickly.
RVA23 provides essentially the same feature-set as ARM64 or x86-64v4 including both virtualization and vector capabilities. In other words, RVA23 is the first RISC-V profile to match what modern applications and workflows require.
The good news is that I expect this to remain the minimum profile for quite a long time. Even once RVA30 and future profiles appear, there may not be much pressure for things like Linux distributions to drop support for RVA23. This is a lot like the modern x86-64 space where almost all Linux distributions work just fine on x86-64 v1 even though there are now v2, v3, and v4 available as well. You can run the latest edition of Arch Linux on hardware from 2005. It is hard to predict the future but it would not surprise me if Ubuntu 30.04 LTS ran just fine on RISC-V hardware released later this year.
But ya, anything before RVA23, like the RVA22 Titan we are discussing here, will be stuck forever on older distros or custom builds (like Ubuntu 25.04).
I'm not even sure it's just instruction support that's the problem with the RV2. I bought one since I thought it would be cool to write a bare metal os for it (especially after I found the AI results to be so bad.) But the lack of documentation has been making it very hard to get anything actually up and running. The best I've got is compiling their custom u-boot and linux repos, and even those come with some problems.
I have been disappointed with Orange Pi hardware, I am not surprised.
Seldom does an SBC vendor want to actually support their products. You get the distro they made at launch, that is it. They do no updates or support. They just want to sell an overpriced chipset with a fucked and unwieldy boot sequence.
Same thing with all the Android devices. Pick a version of Android that you like because that's what you'll have on it forever.
My Pixel has gotten a couple major Android version bumps.
Milk-V Titan is a Mini-ITX RISC-V board that has support for UEFI with ACPI and SMBIOS, 1x M key PCIe Gen4 x16 slot with GPU support, 2x USB Type-C (though unfortunately not USB-C PD), and a 12V DC barrel jack.
What is the difference in performance?
Titan hw docs: https://milkv.io/docs/titan/getting-started/hardware
To add a 2x20 pin (IDE ribbon cable) interface like a Pi: add a USB-to-2x20 pin board, use an RP2040/RP2350 (Pi Pico (uf2 bootloader) over serial over USB or Bluetooth or WiFi; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967
I’d also like an updated RISC-V Framework laptop board. There is one but it’s too limited. If they came out with that I’d try it as a laptop.
I mean a board with decent storage and better performance.
i dream of a risc-v or mips phone and/or home router or something similar. and that it runs some kind of linux. and that whatsapp and google authenticator works on it. is android an acceptable flavor of linux?
The board itself looks pretty spartan, at least compared to any other x86 ITX board I’ve seen in the last ten years. The only thing it doesn’t seem to have is audio jacks.
Is that because the platform itself is very lite, or is just typical for a dev ITX board?
https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/01/12/milk-v-titan-a-329-o...
Another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588159
Oh, no vector extension. Probably a dealbreaker for me.
why?
Well Linux distros are consolidating around RVA23 target, for one thing (I'm not OP).
RISC-V Vector is roughly equivalent to MMX, SSE, and AVX. A lot of tasks without those instructions are flat out slower without.
The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
Another chip without V extension.
Let's be honest - RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage. ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases, has far more choices on the market, much better performance, greater software ecosystem and tooling.
For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different". Before you start to be excited about those a few cents risc-v MCUs - there are much cheaper MCUs, consider those risc-v MCUs are dead expensive.
Thanks for reading my honest opinions, please feel free to downvote.
Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.
I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.
ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here
The number of companies creating RISC V implementations is pretty hopeful. There's way more competition here than x64 or ARM, and that could yield some interesting results.
It matters in that it opens up competition and allows fully-open designs, which should keep prices low and products available, but you're right that having fully-open state-of-the-art chips is unlikely to happen any time soon.
exactly.
in fact, such ISA is only going to fuel more closed ecosystems as it made hundreds of Chinese vendors to join the game for free, they all suddenly got the chance to build their totally closed platforms.
Which makes the whole ecosystem a lot more open. None of those suppliers is going to have the market power to lock you in. You can get it from the lowest cost provider until something higher value comes along.
And if you are a country, nobody can kill your RISC-V ecosystem. Worst case, you have to design your own chips but at least all the software exists and is established. And Ooen Source cores exist and are getting better. They may not be bleeding edge but they could be good enough if push came to shove. The BOOM chip just got vector extensions.
I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things
If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.
For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.
And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).
It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.
Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.
High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.
This is a bold prediction but I thing “alliances” will form where industry players collaborate (like we are seeing in video codecs). And the basic core could become an Open Source project just like Linux did. Operating Systems and codecs were (and are) expensive too.
But there are different levels of proprietary. Having your entire software ecosystem impossible to lock-in means something. And competition tends to breed openness.
MIPS certainly did gain a lot of traction. It was a real force at one point and the world is awash in them. But of course MIPS (the company) is RISC-V now.
An operating system can be coded on one not particularly powerful computer by one person and it costs a few pennies to compile and test. A lot of other open source projects were also initiated by one or two talented people. Software is absurdly inexpensive to develop relative to its complexity.
A cutting edge processor requires personnel across several disciplines and millions in specialized equipment to both validate the implementation of the architecture and the electrical behavior of the circuits and each time it's "compiled" (a batch of test chips fabbed and QAed), it takes a few weeks to be delivered and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ISA being open and royalty-free doesn't affect any of those massive costs.
To use a famous quote: "The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they...' is almost always, 'Money'" Nobody is offering up that kind of money without practical guarantees of success and some kind of profit at the end of it.
“People who care about these things” enough that they’re buying Mini ITX RV motherboards? Definitely well under 1% of the market.
> Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.
you need to be totally autistic to believe that Chinese vendors are going to share anything meaningful with you. they don't hate you, they want their paying customers to be happy, but the brutal competitions in China doesn't allow them to be open in any sense. For products like RISC-V processors and MCUs, the moat is extremely low, being open leads to quick death. It is not about how much stuff they share with you as paying customer, it is about how much they are willing to share with their competitors when there are hundreds of companies trying everything to survive.
as a developer, you just need to ask yourself a dead simple question - how such risc-v platforms are going to be more open than raspberry pi.
How you heard of Deep Computing?
They are pushing their RISC-V products into the Linux mainline before those products even ship.
Those autistic Chinese also contribute a rather surprising amount of Open Source RISC-V out of their academic world.
I have increasingly negative things to say about this.
There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.
This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.
Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.
I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!
I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!
Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.
> Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.
As you note correctly, the ISA is open, not this CPU (or board).
The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it. This CPU can then be open (i.e. you providing the RTL, etc.), if you so desire
I assume it will be much more difficult (or impossible?) to provide the RTL for a CPU with an AMD64 ISA, since that one has to be licensed. I wonder if you paying for the license allows you to share your implementation with the world. Even if it does, it's less likely that you will do so, given that you will have to pay for the licensing fee and make your money back
Since there is no license to pay for in case of RISC-V, it allows you to open up the design of your CPU without you having to pay for that privilege
My superficial understanding is that arm does not prevent from sharing implementation details of your own design but most chips also license a starting implementation that has such limitations. So the end result is often more restricted than the ISA licence some would require
Most ARM licensees aren't permitted to create custom implementations, only to use IP cores provided by ARM. There are a couple of companies who do have an architectural license, allowing them to create their own implementations, but there are only a few of those and they aren't likely to share. (It's also possible that the terms of their license prohibit them from making their designs public.)
The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it.
So? You've been able to do that since...computers. Anyone can roll their own ISA any time they want. It's a low-effort project that someone with maybe a Masters student level of knowledge can do competently. When I was in school, we even had a class where you would cook up an (simple) ISA and implement it (2901 bit-slice processors); these days they use FPGAs.
So you got your own processor for your own ISA...that was slow, expensive (no economy of scale) and without a market. But very fun, and open source, at least. And if "create your own CPU that implements it" is what you want, go forth and conquer...everything you need is already there and has been for a long time.
But if your goal is "I want an open source ISA that I can produce that's price and/or performance competitive with the incumbents", well, that's a totally different ballgame.
And there are open source ISAs that have been around for decades (SPARC, POWER, SuperH). These are ISAs that already have big chunks of ecosystem already in place. The R&D around how to make them competitive already exists. Some, like LEON SPARC have even gone into something like production (and flown in space).
So, yes, an open source ISA affords the possibility that we can make processors based on our own ISAs on our own terms. It has even in extremely rare occasions produced a product. But the fact remains, the market hasn't cared in the slightest to invest what's required to turn that advantage into a real competitor to the incumbent processors.
Completely wrong.
Yes, you can create your own ISA. But to run what software?
If I create my own RISC-V implementation, I can install Ubuntu on it. Maybe even Steam.
See the difference?
And, the market has responded with a tidal wave of CPU contenders. Like in the rest of the world, not all of them target the highest end portion of the market. But some are choosing to play there. Have you checked-out Ascalon?
And why did Qualcomm pay all that money for Ventana recently? You do not expect them to release high-end RISC-V chips? I mean, they already ship many low-end ones.
https://tutorial.xiangshan.cc/hpca25/slides/20250302-HPCA25-...
Couldn't have said it better. The moments these people promise everything would be free is a massive red flag. Unfortunately it seems most poodle haven't learned the lesson.
It is a free non-copyleft licence, it is the expected result that derivatives are not similarly free
The RP2350 has a couple Hazard3 cores in it.
Indeed
https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3
> There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V.
with the majority players being Chinese vendors (those you can buy, not including those building RISC-V for their own in-house applications), RISC-V is far less open than ARM or x64.
expecting openness from Chinese vendors is like trying to hook up with some virgin bar girls in your favourite gogo bar in Bangkok.
Get your virgin bar girls here…
https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
are you joking?
if you search their public media releases, they mentioned that their cores are used by some imaginary vendors for undisclosed platforms. just go and check how CLOSE those junks are. product names and models are always omitted, it is always "certain vendor", "one AI card", no spec no details whatsoever...
searching their names on taobao.com returns 0 hit, searching their names on the largest Chinese second hand platform returns 0 hit. 4 years after they started doing their great open project, you can't even buy one from the OPEN market! that is VERY OPEN to me.
>> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different".
How is that feeling "false"? People running RISC-V systems are different, or at least they have different motivations than you.
> How is that feeling "false"? People running RISC-V systems are different, or at least they have different motivations than you.
this is like saying being homeless is a lifestyle choice. some people argue that with a passion, I just choose to be kind to those people.
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage.
Agreed. Boards like this are helpful for getting RISC-V to the next stage, where it could make sense for more users.
> please feel free to downvote
Not sure why anybody would downvote your comment
> RISC-V doesn't make sense to 99% users at this stage
Not sure about the exact percentage but your basic point is valid. Adding "at this stage" makes it hard to argue with you.
> ARM is cheaper for 99% use cases
It may be 100% of use cases today. Facts are facts. You probably need to add "at this stage" again though.
> ARM ... has far more choices on the market
Very much so. Again, today...
That said, it is worth noting that almost all ARM "choices" are licensing the same small number of core designs from ARM. Already there are beginning to be enough RISC-V suppliers that some users may like the RISC-V options better in some niches (see automotive and some edge AI for example).
> ARM ... has ... much better performance
Absolutely. But that may not stay true for long. RISC-V CPUs will appear this year that equal or exceed CPU designs from ARM themselves in performance (eg. Ascalon). And we will see where things go from there. It will be a while before RISC-V beats Apple Silicon of course. And even once RISC-V gets there on performance, ARM may lead on price/performance for a while. That is, until RISC-V volumes start to equal or exceed other ISAs...
> greater software ecosystem and tooling
On the Open Source side at least, this is already a weak point. You can get multiple Linux distributions for RISC-V today, including from critical players like Ubuntu and Red Hat. The Linux kernel has a tonne of dedicated RISC-V support. Even though there are hardly any RISC-V chips with vector extensions in the wild, you already see Open Source packages adding support for these extensions. Both Clang and GCC have great RISC-V support. There are already x86-64 emulation layers for RISC-V. Ecosystems like QEMU support RISC-V. Even niche projects like Haiku OS support RISC-V. And on the hardware side, RISC-V players like Tenstorrent are advancing Open Source tooling and toolkits like crazy. The ecosystem is great now and getting better every day which, given the complete lack of real RISC-V hardware on desktops and servers, shows you how excited the industry is for RISC-V and how much support it is going to get.
Remaining gaps in ecosystem and tooling will close quickly. Starting with the board that we are discussing here, Titan, RISC-V is entering an era of being good enough to actually use. Linux and the universe of software associated with it are going to support RISC-V rather robustly. And while some RISC-V suppliers will follow the ARM path, many RISC-V suppliers are being good about getting support into the Linux mainline.
I expect ecosystem and tooling to be better for RISC-V than for ARM in general (though both will be great).
> For 99% users, the only real "benefit" RISC-V can bring to the table is the _false_ feeling that "I am different"
> _false_
False.
Here we disagree. But again, it may mostly be about the percentage. Because most users just want something that runs their software at the highest speed for the lowest price. And see above for how we agree that it will be a few years yet before people that do not otherwise care about RISC-V will find it the best option based on simple price/performance (though I do think that day will come).
But there are many "real" benefits to RISC-V.
Perhaps the biggest benefit is that it is an ecosystem that cannot be truly dominated by a single player or even by a small few. I wish RISC-V suppliers great success, and many will find niches that make them rich. But the amount of market power they can ever wield is limited by competition. I for one want this to be my future and I cannot wait to get on the train.
This is just my opinion but I think RISC-V is very well designed. I want to build software for the platform. I want to use assembly language on it. It seems much more pleasant than x86-64 and even ARM. This is a big benefit to me.
Similarly, RISC-V as an ISA and an ecosystem will be uniquely scalable. The same basic ISA can be used on the smallest micro-controllers or the most complex AI supercomputers. And it can be used in the support chips every step of the way. The expertise that I acquire using RISC-V will be broadly applicable over space and time.
And, while this is a prediction, RISC-V will have longevity. Suppliers can go out of business. RISC-V is not a supplier. Once it takes hold, it is not going anywhere. Many an ISA has dominated the computing landscape only to be abandoned and forgotten. RISC-V was inspired by MIPS (the ISA) and MIPS workstations used to cost as much as a small house. But now MIPS (the company) is a RISC-V supplier. x86-64 may seem unassailable but ARM has certainly kept it out of many niches and now ARM is starting to be credible on desktops and servers. x86-64 could go away (especially if Intel failed--not impossible). And ARM is very vulnerable to RISC-V (if you ask me). But for RISC-V to go away, there would have to be yet another totally open ISA that the entire world rallied behind. That is not how things generally work. Like Linux, RISC-V is destined to become a natural monopoly in my view and to be with us a very, very, very long time.
And, for now at least, RISC-V is just more interesting. Companies like Tenstorrent are doing really interesting things. Universities are doing interesting work and sharing it with the world. Those two things came together just the other day when RISC-V vector extensions were added to BOOM. It is a fun space to watch and it will be a fun space to be a part of.
And just like every school teaches software in Java, every school is going to teach programming and electronics with RISC-V. It is going to be the default technology in the future. And that means that it will be the go-to for start-ups as well. RISC-V will be the go-to technology for innovation.
Finally, what I will end with is that the real inevitability of RISC-V has nothing to do with users. Companies will choose RISC-V. But not to save a few bucks on ISA licensing like everybody imagines. That may be a benefit but it does that amount of cost is not going to drive most decisions. But the more critical issue with licensing is control.
Take the situation with ARM and Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants to release its own high-performance silicon to compete with the likes of Intel and Apple. They licensed the ARM ISA to do this. And then ARM tried to stop them from releasing this technology over a license dispute. Yes, it was over money (which matters) but the much bigger deal is that ARM (a supplier to Qualcomm) tried to dictate how Qualcomm can run its business. Qualcomm recently bought a prominent high-performance RISC-V designer. I think these facts are related.
If you bet your business on ARM, you better hope that ARM likes your strategy. If they do not, they may try to stop you. Why would Qualcomm want to create a business around ARM if ARM is going to represent a strategic risk like this? Why would Amazon or NVIDIA? Building the same business around RISC-V eliminates that risk. You do not have to ask permission for whatever you do with RISC-V. Nobody can file an injunction on a RISC-V supplier for using RISC-V.
This is why China is so into RISC-V. Even for them, it is not really to save on license costs. It is about reducing legal and geopolitical exposure. US sanctions led to ARM refusing to work with Chinese suppliers like Huawei. The US cannot sanction RISC-V as a technology. Fast forward to today and there are now many, many companies around the world rethinking their exposure to US based technology companies. There is a reason that RISC-V International is based in Switzerland even though RISC-V was invented in California. Europe is investing in home-grown RISC-V solutions. So is India. Tenstorrent came from Canada. Andes is out of Taiwan. It is not just China.
So, no need to downvote. But if you really think RISC-V has no benefits, the next 5 years are really going to confuse you.
> ARM > greater software ecosystem and tooling.
Like no UEFI, no PC architecture (every board is different), got to x86 complexity (a miriad of instruction sets and extensions) in just a couple of years, needs a special linux kernel to boot with support for newer versions not planed.
Yeah, great software, great tooling. /s
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