RISC-V is the Linux of CPU architecture/instruction sets. It's important.

It was a real loss to the community when Ian left Anand but I'm glad to see he's still out here making content for us.

For the RISC-V fragmentation bit, there are standards now! They call them Profiles. That's what software will be expected to target in the future, if successful, and that's the minimum base that most hardware will want to support.

Years ago I took a class with Dr. Patterson, one of the guys who came up with RISC-V. I'm sure he's very pleased by the acceptance of the architecture thus far.

The moment you mentioned Jim Keller I know that whatever he works on will be successful . That guy has the golden touch

Many years ago Intel sealed the fate of x86 by ignoring the low power processor market. They were so deep into CISC that they felt that more instructions was the way to continue capturing value. So folks like me and Apple switched to ARM. That was all well and good except for ARM's licensing games, so I've moved to RISC-V where I don't have to worry about this anymore. I currently have microcontrollers running RISC-V and it's been a seamless transition. I expect the same as we get to larger processors. But why I really think RISC-V will win is as follows: 1. Linux has proven that open source works 2. The rate of innovation is higher with more players 3. Because of its block architecture, fabrication costs are lower because you only need transistors for the modules you include 4. No ISA licensing fees or worries about future shenanigans by the license holder as we see with ARM today 5. Greater security as fewer instructions reduce the attack surface. Generating code with compilers makes security patches easier 6. As mentioned in the video, the Chinese have an intense interest in getting away from licensing restrictions as levers to make them bend to international will This time has been long coming for a part of the industry that still remains mostly proprietary. I first encountered RISC in the early 1980s and was immediately sold on the architecture. It's taken a long time to get RISC into the mainstream with ARM. But no one wants ARM to become the next Intel by protecting what it has from innovation. As always happens in the computer industry, once an ecosystem becomes large (Windows, x86, IBM, and now ARM) and is controlled by a few players then those entities switch from innovation to defense of their technology to retain their dominance. Open source fixes this problem. And I wouldn't worry about fragmentation. Linux has shown that good ideas stick around and bad ideas get kicked to the curb. It's market forces in action.

love this type of coverage, thank you pcworld channel

Happy that Gordon is getting recommended to me more often. He's so pleasant to watch and listen to.

Balanced and informative. Good questions. Thanks for not talking-over the expert. :)

In the embedded MCU space, Risc-V can also be "interesting", like when Espressif is now making more and more chips based on this architecture, without involving Arm licences. Absolutely not high performance, but quite useful for IoT purposes and such. And hobbyists. I've also got a number of boards with ESP32-C3 which is the first of them, and with suitable firmware, it works great.

I don't watch many PC hardware videos, but I definitely enjoy videos from Gordon at PCWorld

How fast RISC-V will gain market share in the consumer-facing space is mainly a matter of how greedy ARM will dare to get. ARM ownership changing hands every few years with the looming possibility that it may get bought out by one of your competitors and price you out of the market over the next 5-10 years would be another reason for anyone who depends heavily on ARM for their business to get RISC-V migration plans ready just in case and arrange existing work accordingly.

Thank you Dr Ian and Thank you Cameraman!

Thanks guys, very insightful! Thin clients, of cpurse! (*"course", but that typo was just too good xD)

it's got lots of competition! it's a super view of where aggressive the chip market stands! good luck!

Not for or against RISC-V, but I think it'll be down to any adoption in China if RISC-V makes it to the big time. This is down to a move away, forced or voluntarily, from US or Western tech, hardware and software, such as x856 ARM, Microsoft Windows, maybe also Apple and Android. It will be RISC-V and some form of Linux as the OS. If China starts to mass manufacture these and begins to sell to the world, it will be a game changer. China could even donate millions of new RISC-V Linux based PCs to the developing world to kick start it too. I'm sure India could do much the same too. I give it a timeframe of about 5 years though to the mainstream consumer.

The UKposts channel "Explaining Computers" 6 month ago used a Risk 5 computer running Linux for a week as his only computer. He did emails, editing videos, word processing, watching UKposts videos. IMO, Risk 5 will be successful in industry and with the public but like Linux it will have a limited market share. It may be of interest to governments concerned about back doors in X86 and ARM processors.

So then it isn't a hype. RISC-V is cutting out its own specialized market segment.

Horse Creek looks like a really good chip for Network Attached Storage devices to replace the Jasper Lake cores used today.

Good review, thanks. I do embedded and I look to RISC-V as a possible ARM competitor in embedded.

Great interview. This is what it looks like when knowledgeable people speak. Thanks.

Listened very intently but had my eyes on the girl in the white dress the whole interview.

What was the purple case in the ad? It looks cool.

It's a good idea to se something in action... ExplainingComputers channel done a demo on RISC-V ; episode title : VisionFive 2: RISC-V Quad Core Low Cost SBC

RISC-V got the vocal minority like Linux has, very often for the same reason (they tend towards open/freedom). Google is working on making Android to work on RISC-V so I would think that would be the earliest for it to be a thing for regular people. Otherwise perhaps small board computers like Raspberry pie will also be more RISC-V but not everyone is interested in such computer (as mentioned in the video, SiFive already got such a board with Linux being an option).

Google is actively pushing RISC-V enablement in Android and ChromeOS, I've been saying this is the first way it'll be in consumer products as an application processor since 2015. There are standardized platforms now with combinations of extension profiles (e.g. RVA22) and firmware platforms. It is poised to make it into competitive consumer products as an application processor in a matter of a couple years.

5:05 I wonder if pinecil and ESP32-C3 (along with some other ESP32s) are a good counter arguments

Likely the role of global politics and international trade barriers will be the determining factors in if RISC-V will be a success. Open Source though, Love it! Peace.

RISC-V is the future, and likely always will be.

This is the thing though, right. My LSI SATA HBA has a PowerPC core in it, because PowerPC cores are super cheap and they are a form of RISC. RISC-V may easily be what replaces small embedded cores like that for the foreseeable future, and it's going to be really interesting because RISC-V is so much more customisable.

I didn't expect less from PCWorld. RISC-V ISA has a very fast adoption by the industry and a free software stack. When they start fearmongering is when you know is about to happen.

I have a particular use case which I can use one of the more unusual aspect of the available boards for is an Intrusion detection system based on snort. The feature that attracts me is that these boards have two ethernet ports which means I can force all traffic through the board!

Looking sharp Gordon!

Thank you James.... if u know, u know.

Kudos to the cameraman who kept subtly panning to include the booth babe in the white dress in the shot.

There are a few risc-v sbc/dev boards starting to show up in Asian markets that advertise Linux support. Not sure how standardised they are though, haven't got any of them.

As I listen to this 8 months beyond its publishing on YT, Google has announced a smartphone based on a RISC-V design. Less than a year past this interview. Not 10, 15, or 20 years. As the Chinese ramp up with their fabrication capabilities, I would imagine that they will build very sophisticated, high-performance RISC-V implementations that are intended to completely circumnavigate the choke hold that Western firms like Intel have held over the market since its inception in the 1970s.

Jim Keller is a journeyman computer architect. Patterson has been slapping the monkey in academia his whole life. Patterson has been working on an ISA for forty freakin' years.

Anyone see the booth lady in white dress? ❤

The instructions set is whatever GCC and LLVM output. Chips will need to support that, and compilers are going to support the chips. People will only add new instructions for very specialised systems. My prediction: expect RISC-V to appear in Google mobile phones soonish.

Yes.

Why no link to SilverStone?

Ive got a riscv64 virtual machine running Ubuntu mantic Minotaur on an amd fx9370 host Pretty much everything works well enough (haven't tested virtio-gpu yet), except pci passthrough from shot to guest... Tho to be fair, it doesn't seem to work with an aarch64 guest either Does anyone have any info on cross-architecture pci- passthrough?

when will we have a risc-v 3.x ghz CPU. ?

Ahem, the Power (formerly PowerPC) architecture is still here 😂

i think if risc-v was licensed under GPT it would help a lot with the fragmentation issue

There are few companies designing high performance arm cores. Since there are so few designers, it is warrented to ask if this will change with risc-v?

i like Ian. he knows his stuff.

Flash & RAM is generous on the RISC-V's

Well I say there's 2 instructions that should be required no matter what (making them up btw): TAILOR: give 0 if following a global standard like x86 is, an address to a string of instructions if a custom standard STANDARD: 0 if custom standard, an address for a string for what global standard following along with the version As long as those 2 are supplied any installer that supports the relevant standards they indicate can produce the software binary/binaries needed

RISC-V is not really that much different from ARM when it first began. It is all about industry adoption, a x8086 works as well as a ARM chip in a PC once it is adapted for the purpose. So I would disagree with Ian on 10-15 years, if the China choose to adopt it for their market it will happen in 3. It doesn't take very long to extend the instruction set and a little longer to design the circuits to implement them. It is a lot easier now with the established execution sets. I have worked with at least 6 CPU families, some at the assembler level. You can design a CPU around an old execution set like Sun SPARC or MIPS and phones will still work on it. It is all about the adoption and funding, it is not all that difficult. If Nvidia buys ARM, RISC-V will take off. Same with OS, Harmony OS will take off if the Chinese government funds it and decrees it.

I'm ready for RISC-VI

The whole thing about licensing with ARM is a beat up. ARM charges peanuts for it. Consider the scale of ARM usage, and the paltry value of the company. What you are paying for is a patron, someone ensuring that standards are adhered to. RISC-V is at risk of fragmenting, everyone will just implement their own standards. The groups pushing for RISC-V adoption are more likely those that are affected by things like technology export controls.

I am eager to have a Horse Creek development workstation

to be fair, we have proton on linux translating windows games to work on linux/steamdeckOS, so could something happen to desktop computing where we move to RISK and have a translation layer that flawlessly runs windows x86-64 applications? because if that happens we might see a switch away from x86-64 pretty fast. riscV, riscV, riscV

Betteridge's Law. RISC-V is to ISAs what Linux is to operating systems: the lack of licensing royalties and restrictions alone adds considerable value. Even if it's not that good *now*, it'll get better soon.

good report. mb

what will happen to amd x xilinx, it seems no news / leak about it

RISC-V first takes up the microcontroller market. Right now it is already risky not to use either ARM or RISC-V there. Then there are more chips sold using RISC-V rather than anything else. Finally standards and community economies of scale start kicking in, Once they come up with a successful kind of Pi alternative in that chip or a dev board. Then it reings in GPUs and other coprocessors, finally Intel and ARM will start to worry as performant and efficient CPUs start cropping up in RISC-V. Or at least that is a plausible future.

In my humble, the importance of RISC-V cannot be overstated.

I was talking about Bluetooth back in 2001 with manufacturer reps while working at a B2B IT products provider and it really only has grown into it's own in more recent years. Lots of great stuff out there but adoption and maturity of tech is very slow. Look how long we had to accept downgraded and lower resolutions of 1080p before industry would or could move on.

The llvm compiler has made fragmentation a small issue.

👍 The doctor's in the house

RISC-V would be the platform for opensource hardware like networking, display controllers etc....

RISC-V follows the same adoption as Linux, invisible but in plain sight.

SBC as "Small Business Computer", that's a new one. His doctorate is in Chemical Engineering.

I believe that RISC-V will become huge! Even surpassing both x86 and ARM within a decade. Because it's open source and with a well-defined simple instruction set set in stone. ARM and x86 are much messier and proprietary.

It's an open source instruction set..not an open source CPU architecture. There's a big difference. There's a big misconception about RISC-Vs "openness"

Like Linux odds are without centralized standards that are enforced it's gonna get the "fork it until it dies" treatment. Super fragmented development projects that don't play nice with one another that ends up so convoluted that it's not really suitable for general consumer use.

our interest is in potential PERFORMANCE gain of RISC V, given that x86 barely has any development. BUT, yeah someone needs to shout National Security Threat before they go 64bit. I am sure someone is already looking to drive that move.

A 20 second scan of the comments and it confirms Gordon was spot on!

We'll see if RISC is good. Yes, that was a Hackers reference.

System76 is a surprisingly bad example for a potential user of RISC-V. Everything they do is premium x86. I think he meant companies like PINE64.

Arm is over twenty five years old now. Fifteen years for RISC V to reach Arm in terms of maturity and penetration is a realistic endorsement. If the market gets constrained through monopoly or politics then Risc V might get accelerated development and use.

Fragmentation and backwards instruction set compatibility is a very big deal. Agree with Ian fully, small players and academia for a long time. Also if low/no royalties were the core defining feature, we would be using MIPS/longsoon or whatever now. Not x86/arm. Mostly the production level CPU design is still not free, only the instruction set. Afaik the MIPS royalties have been the lowest in the industry for two decades (not ARM/x86), toolchains have been there, everything. If it was the defining feature it would be already mostly MIPS. Free does matter for some cases (specially startups etc), but if it was that important, MIPS already would be dominant.

RISC-V is better because it's royalty free, not because you can add instructions. If I build an ASIC with a CPU embedded, then I don't want to have to write a C/Zig/Rust compiler, and I don't want to pay to buy a licence to a commonly used CPU, like ARM.

As a consumer point of view. I am sick.of ARM, most if not all ARM devices are trash, as in throw away. You cant really run the latest Linux, Android or Windows. You have to be very lucky and have some major community support to get ports of anything let alone unlock the bootloader and get binary drivers working. Most OEM drop support and that makes me weary about SOC on x86. X86 is still the most open hardware from a user, you can run anything. Risc-V would be a nice addition, however. I expect this same companies will continue the ARM/Snapdragon/M* restritive gimpin games, but with arm. Once get good risc routers the gates will open.

WebAssembly makes the standards now. ARM, x86 and RISC-V implement that standard.

The whole RISC-V fandom seems to be based on primarily a misunderstanding of computing efficiency. People really think CISC is complex (I guess because it's in the name) and therefore inefficient, while in reality if you go look at an average pipeline pretty much everything is very similar at similar levels of performance. You just can't go without transaction lookahead or instruction reordering or any other 'big-on-silicon' features if you want to go to modern computing loads. Simplifying processors to the degree that 'people who think RISC is actually a simple instruction set' say only works if you're making a coin cell operated microcontroller. Anything remotely more complex is going to benefit from many of the more complex features of modern processors and the instruction set becomes basically meaningless at that point.

Chip with ARM architecture is RISC too right ? Not RISC V but RISC.

Idk lad, if it delivers the same performance as of the rpi 4 while demanding four times as less energy compared, then I'd call it a win as is.

Speaking of bad jokes, I thought of this one the other day: "Elixir, she loves it."

Risc-V in the consumer market will be huge, but that's probably 10 years or more into the future.

Gordon is the only reason PCWorld is still relevant

What is the issue of having “Domain Specific” functionality in a CPU? Is this not the way Apple has been able to differentiate their product? I thought the whole purpose of embedded is just that, a sole purpose solution. Arm does this already “ again Apple as a reference“ get DSf in their chip even for their PC. Why would you not want to have the best HW if you are building a sole purpose solution, even those that could be running an OS, it happens in Intel, they license their tools and give you different level of IP access to best leverage the CPU… RISC-V enable a baseline from which to build and develop you application closer to the HW, which is really the trend that is happening *look at GPU and MPU solutions.

riscV is more open and innovative but if they can make a real run - even people like ibm have failed spectacularly so everything remains to be seen, arm looks pretty strong - all these companies need to build a portfolio and good sw/hw stacks - they aren't there yet but mkt sentiment is growing for these alternative platforms - wait and see

When I saw the thumbnail I thought that was Ru Paul

RISC-V is about as useful as the OPEN ITU X.25 standard. Being a set of documents agreed by, and tweaked through a committee, that some could choose, if they have a few billion to spare, to create some network hardware and a software stack, that's at a theoretical level free of any requirement to licence IP to virtually implement, though obviously IP licences will need to be obtained for the patents protecting the technologies involved in physically implementing the OPEN network stack. Before paying to have someone certify your implementation against the standard, and test with other implementations, created by other mega-corps. To be able to offer a product that uses a different standard to what 99% of the Globe has used for 40+ years. Unlike Linux, which was one students attempt to write a better, A.out binary compatible, x86, UNIX like kernel than the FreeBSD and Minix offerings available, in the late 1980s, so he could leverage the whole, then 15 year old, GNU software stack (without recompiling the packages) on his PC, and without having to hand over any money to Microsoft, Commodore, Acorn, NeXT, HP, Apple, SUN, Oracle, or any of the other commercial BSD Kernel modders, with a certified UNIX (Obtained through the companies paying for their distributions to be certified against the standard). Once written anyone with an internet connection could download a copy of his kernel source, and GNU tools, onto 50+ floppies, and have a UNIX like OS up in a week or two, or for the exchange of a few Beer Tokens pick up a set of CDs / floppies with a Slackware / RedHat distribution of the Linus's KERNEL and the many others GNU tools. (Google the difference between LINUX and GNU, or TRANSMISSION and CAR). Add the requirement to have any implementation certified as RISC-V, before it can be sold as such (like UNIX), which costs more than a few Beer Tokens. You'll likely see a few mega-corps possibly embedding RISC-V LIKE (uncertified) cores of their own or sourced from a RISC-V design seller, on high volume, low value SoC's, to literally save 10c per die.

Ian, where is my potato chip?!

Pc world still exists?

I am designing with microcontrollers regularly and I really don't give a fucking shit about what's inside or what instruction set that chip has. The compiler takes care of all of that for me. I care about IO features and maybe libraries and OS support, but that's about it.

This will end up like the MSX standard in the '80s. Fragmented and with software that cannot leverage special capabilities of the hardware. Since software was/will be developed for the lower common denominator.

I think we are going to continue seeing an escalation of RISC-V development, shorter than what it took ARM to catch up with the x86_x64 with the Apple M1. RISC-V combined with Linux is going to come much sooner. I'm thinking on Smartphones with Android OS, PCs with Chrome OS and gaming with Steam OS. It has only been about 8 yrs since RISC-V was started. Valve is using a very custom APU in the Steam Deck, eventually they will switch to RISC-V because nothing else is more custom than RISC-V.

ARM has the problem with proprietary driver blobs. Also, I want chips which can be sanded down to look for hardware backdoors.

I don't get why there isn't an Apple Silicon competitor for laptops still.

The only key word missing from this was Celeron 😆

11:33 The US in a nutshell

You will never see. ..... for now? I think the guy is right for micro controllers. But I see in the near future e,g. applications like smartphones.

Can you guys add subtitles please?