RISC-V is taking over the world at quite the pace.

I doubt it won't be bigger than ARM ever was or ever will be; within just 3 years from now I expect it to be taking on x86.

Wishful thinking, it hardly matters beyond some embedded workloads.

It does appear to be at least trying to go up the value chain, and - perhaps weirdly - it also seems to be getting a look-in with supercomputers.

For the "up the value chain" bit, things like the very-early-stage PineTab-V:

https://www.pine64.org/2023/04/01/march-update-tablet-bonanz...

Plus the Tenstorrent (Canadian based) server oriented stuff:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tenstorrent-shares-roadmap...

For the supercomputer bit:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-to-explore-risc-v-is...

and:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/06/09/strong-showing-for-f...

Whether any of that will get traction is clearly a "who knows" thing, but the signs seem to be pointing in the positive direction.

The timeline is what it is. Specs such as V, H or the Zb* needed for server/workstation workloads were ratified in late 2021.

Assuming hardware was developed alongside the specs, which didn't change much near the time of ratification, then 2-3 years need to be added for actual products. We are about to see the first wave.

We know Tenstorrent (CEO: Jim Keller) has a design they expect to release in 2024 with performance competitive with projected Zen5 (also 2024), but using less power. That's Ascalon, a design led by the same person who was M1's chief architect at Apple.

We also know SiFive, MIPS, Rivos, Ventana are each working on their own very high performance designs, and have teams full of extremely capable people who have a history of success in high performance chips. That's a lot, and that's just what we know of. There's necessarily more efforts beyond the surface, which we don't yet know about.

Ventana's Veyron might be the first to market, with server chips expected 2023H2.

What matters is seeing AWS, Azure and GCP adopting them at a scale that surpaces ARM, likewise Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung et al for their OSes.

Yes.

Microsoft and Google, their RISC-V efforts we already know about.

Android RISC-V port, already merged upstream, was an effort funded by by Chinese SoC vendors. Capable chips and smartphones will follow, this is an inevitability.

As for AWS, GCP and Azure (sorted them in actual order of relevance), they will definitely start offering RISC-V support at some point and then we can see whether it picks up.

But high performance server hardware is a prerequisite for this to be possible, thus my parent post.

> RISC-V is taking over the world

Citation needed.

Apple is the most successful ARM platform as of now. Everything else is minor compare to them. I would really like to see that we have RISC-V as an alternative platform but right now it is a nice toy to play with and even for the toy usecases the selection is very limited.

Feel free to poke me once Microsoft decides to support Apple's hardware on Windows for ARM.

I honestly do not see it happening.

Until then, whatever hardware Apple has is irrelevant to the Windows discussion.

Microsoft is already having issues to move Windows development community into ARM for the last decade, it is a pipe dream they will ever care with RISC-V.

>it is a pipe dream they will ever care with RISC-V.

They already care about RISC-V as I explained in other posts in this discussion, and there's not even hardware yet.

Hardware is finally about to show up, also explained, to you specifically, in another post in this discussion.

RISC-V is inevitable.

> RISC-V is inevitable.

While it does seem pretty likely, "inevitable" is perhaps overstating things.

If RISC-V does make solid inroads into servers and supercomputers, then (perhaps ironically?) the US gov may start doing funky things to suppress it. They don't want China successfully countering the recent chip-making suppression efforts, which RISC-V could enable.

Probably not something we'll see in 2023 though, so that's totally wild guessing. ;)

>"inevitable" is perhaps overstating things.

The momentum has grown far beyond the point of no return.

As we can see it already happening, it is far more likely for me to be struck by lightning than RISC-V not take over the world.

>If RISC-V does make solid inroads into servers and supercomputers

See recent talk from BSC's Mateo Valero[0]. EU's supercomputer roadmap already is RISC-V centric, and their researchers already have a few generations of finished RISC-V designs.

>then (perhaps ironically?) the US gov may start doing funky things to suppress it

They cannot. RISC-V Foundation is based in Switzerland.

0. https://www.youtube.com/@tenstorrentinc (it's somewhere in the recent "Nerds Talking to Nerds About RISC V", which has a load of good talks)

> They cannot. RISC-V Foundation is based in Switzerland.

You're not taking into account the difference between theory and reality.

"In theory" the US government "cannot" due to technical aspects like the RISC-V Foundation being based in Switzerland.

"In reality" though, the US government could (for example) introduce targetted sanctions on companies having anything further to do with RISC-V.

The vast majority of those companies would terminate their RISC-V involvement on the spot, as they have substantial US involvement with their businesses.

The remaining ones could indeed keep on pursing RISC-V, but the whole "take over the world" thing would be either dead or have its timeframe pushed out by many years.

Note - I'm trying to illustrate that "inevitable" isn't correct when powerful players are involved. So the above example is just the first one to spring to mind.

I'll just reiterate: It is far more likely for me to be struck by lightning than RISC-V not take over the world.

RISC-V is inevitable.