I think what the article is going for is that this year we might get to where companies actually sell ARM-based processors so that other companies can use them in their devices instead of one company making it exclusively for their own devices. You know, mass market adoption.
The title is stupid and reeks of SEO where you must include the world AI no matter what though.
RISC-V dates from 2011. RISC processors have been around since the 1980s, and ARM processors (in all our mobile devices) are RISC processors. Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3) is ARM-based so RISC is also in Macs, which proves it’s feasible in high-performing laptop and desktop computers. But the particular appeal of RISC-V is its open licensing.
Ah, thanks. Obviously I didn’t keep up with developments as well as I thought. I knew that Apple Silicon is Arm-based, but I didn’t realize that Arm is RISC.
Yeah, ARM originally stood for Advanced RISC Machines. And the company grew out of Acorn Computers, a British company that made some excellent, innovative computers in the 1980s and 90s, including the BBC Microcomputer (not RISC) and the original RISC machine, the Acorn Archimedes. (The BBC Micro was central to computer education in the UK and the Raspberry Pi is an attempt to get back to the spirit of that project. The Raspberry Pi also uses a RISC CPU.)
RISC-V is also really exciting, yeah. I’m curious if it will have to go through the same slow progression in form factors that we saw with ARM (first embedded, then phones, then tablets, etc.) or if we’ll get high-performance RISC hardware more quickly.
That’s years away though right? Even if we get some this year, they’ll be very immature. When you look at Arm based stuff, especially the Pi 5 and similar, it goes without saying that their time is now.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I’m not saying it’s soon, there’s clearly a lot of work to be done in the space still, I’m just excited for unencumbered processor designs.
RISC-V is exciting for chip manufacturers, not sure why end users should be. I personally don’t care whether the CPU in my system required the producer to pay a license fee.
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