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A comment on Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmarks and early issues. Parent comment

Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by G3rn0ti on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @03:46AM (#39010960)
> RISC-V has miles to go, I worry that with the current pace of ARM it may never catch up.

Only assuming development progress happens linearly. In fact, technical progress goes exponentially. It took years to even get to the point to have RISC-V SoCs and now we are seeing the first laptop products. The pace will accelerate, especially with the promise of RISC-V being a cheaper platform to build hardware on than ARM and X86.

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Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by sapiogram on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @05:28AM (#39011686)
> In fact, technical progress goes exponentially.

Their point was that ARM is also progressing exponentially.

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Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by G3rn0ti on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @07:58AM (#39012783)
This line of arguing would imply that an established company selling established products would not need to fear any competition as long as it can keep the pace of its innovation cycles. While this line of reasoning is not wrong it completely ignores the possibility of "disruptive innovation" to use a buzz word here. I honestly think RISC-V could be a shooting star that will come to many as a surprise. And as long as RISC-V lags in performance behind ARM it could still compete successfully in price due to free licensing of RISC-V versus expensive licensing of ARM64. This has been AMD's strategy for many years (before they had better integrated GPUs compared to Intel). And think of how IBM completely lost its PC business to cheap competition.
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Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by rwmj on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @06:08AM (#39011958)
But only a few companies (two? Arm and Apple?) develop new Arm designs, whereas anyone is free to develop new RISC-V designs.
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Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by bigfishrunning on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @07:25AM (#39012532)
Most of those new Risc-V designs Are on the extreme low end; not a bad thing, but there's not a ton of high performance Risc-V stuff happening.

It's more likely to fill in the ESP32 niche then the ARM one

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Re:Lichee Console 4A – RISC-V mini laptop: Review, benchmark... by brucehoult on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @08:01AM (#39012804)
> but there's not a ton of high performance Risc-V stuff happening.

Uhhh ... yes, there is.

Several companies designing very high performance RISC-V were founded in 2021 or so. Most of them have top designers fresh from designing the latest Apple, Intel, AMD chips and they are aiming to match current x86 and Apple performance.

You'll see their products in the market around 2026.

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