The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers.
Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon.
And in fact, it's dire. It's crap.
Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76.
Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start.
... and asked him, telling him that I was the Linux reporter from The Register. He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
That was November 2023.
It didn't happen.
At the following Ubuntu Summit, I spoke to Nirav Patel right after he did this demo:
«
It runs, it works, and even high-definition video playback is smooth, but this is not a powerhouse CPU. The machine we tried was sluggish and not very responsive. Even playing a single YouTube video, CPU utilization in the System Monitor was pretty high, and it was working hard when we tried moving the video window around. Minimizing it did reduce the CPU burden, though. Aside from video decoding, the machine felt less responsive than our old Raspberry Pi 3, to pick a more familiar example. In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance.
»
We are another year on, and I just recently returned from the following Ubuntu Summit. I am still waiting.
A RVA20 compliant chip, released in 2023. I have one of these (VisionFive 2, received February 2023) with a couple hard disks and ZFS, serving as home NAS. Between RPi 3 and RPi 4 in CPU speed, similar I/O as RPi 4.
Obviously not a speed demon, but it was the very first mass-produced RISC-V SoC.
>He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
Probably the Intel thing that never actually happened, despite there been test chips which is what your acquaintance likely was able to play with.
SiFive released something else instead, earlier this year, as stopgap. Based on their P550 microarchitecture, it is dramatically faster than JH7110, but of no particular interest to anybody not directly involved in RISC-V, as it lacks vector and thus isn't RVA23 compliant.
In 2026, it'll be 2023+3, and many usefully fast RVA23 core IPs (Above Zen1 performance) are expected to finally show up in development boards, although only the one from Tenstorrent has had a concrete announcement so far.
The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers.
Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon.
And in fact, it's dire. It's crap.
Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76.
Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start.
I have Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 5 devices here.
Look at this thing: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure
It is one hundred times the price of a Pi and can it deliver 100x the single thread performance? No, it cannot.
Can any money buy a RISC-V that can compare to the performance of a $60 Pi 5?
I don't think it can, and promises of "jam tomorrow" don't cut it.