Can anyone explain the significance of this? I’m pretty technology-literate, but I am not seeing a big advantage of this over any other Linux machine? Genuinely curious.
RISC-V is an open source chip design. As of today, it’s still worse than x86 (a CISC—“complex instruction set” design) and ARM (a proprietary RISC—“reduced instruction set” design) but if history is any indication, open source will end up overtaking them in the same way that, for instance, 98% of supercomputers today run highly customized versions of Linux.
There’s also some political connotations surrounding it because some countries don’t want high-end chip designs to be available to their perceived competitors (whether for protectionism reasons or military reasons) but it doesn’t matter.
Linux, being open, can already run on RISC-V while Windows ARM laptops are only really coming out now. Not sure if they have plans for RISC-V. Apple has long used ARM in phones and now their M chip laptops. Reduced instruction sets tend to have better battery life and (originally) worse performance so were ideal for mobile but over time, Intel/AMD (desktops/laptops) and ARM (basically all mobile chips) have borrowed ideas from each other. So, Apple’s ARM chips can be powerful and Intel/AMD chips can be power efficient if that’s the goal.
So, the main advantage of RISC-V is that there’s no royalties or, in some cases, the baggage of aging designs that need backwards compatibility. RISC-I was originally designed as a teaching tool for universities that didn’t want to pay royalties for student toy models and wasn’t really a corporate thing. RISC-V is (the fifth version as the Roman numeral V implies), got good enough to be useful in the real world. And now there’s a consortium of companies funding it and hoping to one day not have pay royalties to make chips.
So, there’s a lot of momentum behind RISC-V. It could easily be the primary architecture someday or, if nothing else, reduce the royalty rates of the other architectures.
One of the implications is the development and popularization of the RISC-V architecture, which is open and can open the market for more competition and less monopolies, among other things.
RISC and CISC are two language which your CPU speaks, and which have different strengths and weaknesses. Reduced Instruction Set Computer vs. Complex Instruction Set Computer. It’s something like Chinese vs. English. Either have a word for everything but that means there is a lot of words to learn, or have a smaller amount of words but that means you need more words to describe what you mean.
Highly technical; both been around for a while, and iirc usually CPUs use CISC, but RISC always retained it’s strengths, so scientists are always looking into the difference in application for both.
Ngl I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn but I know Western countries made a fuss about China activitely pushing the lesser used RISC architecture.
Ngl I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn
It’s because of openness/royalties.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on RISC principles. RISC itself is just a design type. ARM is based on RISC too, but it’s proprietary.
Can anyone explain the significance of this? I’m pretty technology-literate, but I am not seeing a big advantage of this over any other Linux machine? Genuinely curious.
RISC-V is an open source chip design. As of today, it’s still worse than x86 (a CISC—“complex instruction set” design) and ARM (a proprietary RISC—“reduced instruction set” design) but if history is any indication, open source will end up overtaking them in the same way that, for instance, 98% of supercomputers today run highly customized versions of Linux.
There’s also some political connotations surrounding it because some countries don’t want high-end chip designs to be available to their perceived competitors (whether for protectionism reasons or military reasons) but it doesn’t matter.
More info for anyone who wants it:
Linux, being open, can already run on RISC-V while Windows ARM laptops are only really coming out now. Not sure if they have plans for RISC-V. Apple has long used ARM in phones and now their M chip laptops. Reduced instruction sets tend to have better battery life and (originally) worse performance so were ideal for mobile but over time, Intel/AMD (desktops/laptops) and ARM (basically all mobile chips) have borrowed ideas from each other. So, Apple’s ARM chips can be powerful and Intel/AMD chips can be power efficient if that’s the goal.
So, the main advantage of RISC-V is that there’s no royalties or, in some cases, the baggage of aging designs that need backwards compatibility. RISC-I was originally designed as a teaching tool for universities that didn’t want to pay royalties for student toy models and wasn’t really a corporate thing. RISC-V is (the fifth version as the Roman numeral V implies), got good enough to be useful in the real world. And now there’s a consortium of companies funding it and hoping to one day not have pay royalties to make chips.
So, there’s a lot of momentum behind RISC-V. It could easily be the primary architecture someday or, if nothing else, reduce the royalty rates of the other architectures.
RISC-V is a CPU architecture, like x86 or ARM. You can run Linux on it.
One of the implications is the development and popularization of the RISC-V architecture, which is open and can open the market for more competition and less monopolies, among other things.
RISC and CISC are two language which your CPU speaks, and which have different strengths and weaknesses. Reduced Instruction Set Computer vs. Complex Instruction Set Computer. It’s something like Chinese vs. English. Either have a word for everything but that means there is a lot of words to learn, or have a smaller amount of words but that means you need more words to describe what you mean.
Highly technical; both been around for a while, and iirc usually CPUs use CISC, but RISC always retained it’s strengths, so scientists are always looking into the difference in application for both.
Ngl I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn but I know Western countries made a fuss about China activitely pushing the lesser used RISC architecture.
It’s because of openness/royalties.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on RISC principles. RISC itself is just a design type. ARM is based on RISC too, but it’s proprietary.
This IS a Linux machine. Do you know what a CPU architecture is?