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[–] 36 points 4 days ago (9 children)

Pretty far off but China has some nice manufacturers...or they would if AI didn't exist.

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  • [–] 38 points 4 days ago (8 children)

    This is generally the problem with ISAs.

    ARM has had decades in the oven, x86 has had almost half a century, while RISC-V manufacturing and ISA development has been generally available only a couple of years.

    The fact is if there isn't a big push by some major vendor - or some nation state, then chances are it'll develop slower than the previously mentioned ISAs.

    From design, to testing, to prefab, to packaging, it's all combined just a single step of the journey to improving yield and performance.

    ARM is unfortunately the current trajectory, with Qualcomm, Apple and now NVIDIA leading the charge - which doesn't bode well, simply because you won't know what the hell the firmware do.

    We could truly use some market disruption in this space and RISC-V, being an open ISA, would be the safest bet for digital sovereignty and user autonomy - but apparently those things are only important on paper.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (7 children)

    Can we make our own RISC-V chips like using FPGAs or something? Or would that be infinitely less robust than anything purpose-built by industry?

    Chinese manufacturers seem to offer plenty of options for RISC-V MCUs and raspberrypi knockoffs, but they seem to be always sold out or they don't ship to my country

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    The ESP32 series have already switched to RISC-V for most models and many other microcontrollers has too. There's not a lot in the laptop/desktop territory but with enough incentives it's gonna happen

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    Oh ya, the C3 and I think the C5. Not sure what the current versions are but if they're in esp32's then I guess that's pretty main stream, just nowhere near a computer processor just yet.

    Are the RISC-V ESP32's cheaper than that ARM ones?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    FPGAs are going to be way more expensive. It's possible, but the cost-to-performance ratio would be abysmal.

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