News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:RISC-V CPU arrives on a tablet starting at $149 by sapiogram on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @07:24AM (#41366350)
> Wonder if any of the RISC-V cpus are fast enough as a daily driver running Linux?

Short answer: Absolutely not, and you pretty much summarized it in your comment. RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago.

Re:RISC-V CPU arrives on a tablet starting at $149 by Pet_Ant on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @07:37AM (#41366440)
I mean maybe not many of us here, but my mom’s daily driver is a Chromebook. I SSH into my server using a Core 2 Dup laptop, that could be replaced.
Re:RISC-V CPU arrives on a tablet starting at $149 by jermaustin1 on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @08:11AM (#41366672)
When I was commuting 2 hours a day on the bus, my daily driver was an 8-inch iPad that I used with a logitec keyboard case tethered to my iPhone for internet, and would connect to my VSCode on my $10/mo droplet using Code-Server.

If you offload the computer to the cloud, and don't need to do anything graphically intense, it makes daily driving an underpowered tablet very easy.

Re:RISC-V CPU arrives on a tablet starting at $149 by ghaff on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @08:21AM (#41366745)
I mean, I keep a 10 year old MacBook in my kitchen/dining room. If someone were still actually making a high-end Chromebook that would be fine. Unfortunately with Google's departure from doing that hardware, it's all pretty much lower-priced educational market stuff and if I really needed a lightweight travel device, I'd get a tablet (which I did recently) or a MacBook Air. MacBooks are low enough maintenance that a good high-res Chromebook wouldn't really be enough cheaper or lighter to really buy you much.
Re:RISC-V CPU arrives on a tablet starting at $149 by brucehoult on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @09:17PM (#41375071)
> RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago.

What do you mean "still"? Those are brand new RISC-V CPUs, or were a year ago when they came out.

The base RISC-V specification which the current cores implement (except the ones from the last couple of months) was not even formally frozen and published yet when the Pi 4 came out. Getting comparable RISC-V boards out in 4 years was a great effort. Note that the Pi 4 arrived eight years after the ARMv8-A spec was published.

That original spec doesn't contain a lot of important things such as SIMD which make a huge difference to those Geekbench scores. They are not comparing like to like.

By this time next year we'll have RISC-V boards performing better than the Pi 5, less than two years after it (possibly 1.5 years).

A year after that, RISC-V things currently well into their design pipeline will be somewhere between Zen 1 and Apple M1 performance.

The rate of progress is incredible. In the last 2-3 years many designers of current CPUs from Apple, Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm have moved to RISC-V companies.