The other issues people state are valid. RISC-V might never catch up in the consumer market (although I wouldn't entirely rule it out eventually). But in the world of embedded systems, RISC-V absolutely has the potential to surpass competing architectures, although it's definitely an uphill battle. I've heard it's also viable for high performance computing, but tbh I'm not an expert and can't speak on that part of it.
The biggest issue is software. There is very little software in RISC-V. Furthermore, big companies don't have a lot of interest in RISC-V, so it's difficult to have high performance and cheap chips, manufacturing chips is very expensive so you need to scale business to be profitable. I don't know how it will be in the long run
https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png
Currently 97% of debian packages build for RISC-V, it's 99% for arm, and 99.5% for x86_64.
Once you've ported you code to more than one platform, as has happened with x86_64 to arm, it's mostly trivial to get it working on another platform.
The biggest part that is missing imo is hand vectorized routines, but that's also slowly starting to catch up.
If you want ANY piece of software to run on multiple different architectures, you need completely different compilers for each architecture (at least the backend targets). It's not as simple as switching out your cpu, you need to compile your software into a completely different stream of code meant for that specific architecture. And it turns out to do this process well is really really hard.
One of the main reasons it took so long for arm to be integrated into computers is because of software. putting apple aside, there were arm based windows machines as early as 2012, but the integration has always been garbage because there was never an incentive (up til now) to make the performance really good.
You can make a cpu that is 10 times better than any other currently out there, but if you can't compile code to run on it then it might as well be a fancy paperweight.
We have complete and tested toolchains for RISC-V for many years, e.g. GCC or CLANG. That covers more than 80% of existing software (which requires these toolchain to build); even operating systems are available (e.g. Linux) which usually have the closest hardware dependency. From my point of view there is little software left which would not run on RISC-V. Thus my question. Your concerns seems to focus on desktop computers; but that's not (yet) the major market for ARM chips. We neither depend on Windows nor macOS in this market.
Able? Yes. Mature? I don't think so.
Good windows support is absolutely necessary for arm to be successful in the computer market. At least from a consumer stand point.
ARM is unlikely to replace x86_64 Windows desktops. There is no advantage for customers to switch. Your concerns seem to focus on the Windows operating system. I agree that maturity of the OS for a specific architecture is essential; but if achieved (which is not that difficult, just remember the very many Unix variants on the different architectures, e.g. Solaris or Irix, which were all mature), recompiling existing software for the OS is not a big deal. Migrating from 32 to 64 bit architectures was a much bigger issue.
Sorry didn't notice that point, I agree there is no need for arm in desktops but I'm more focused on laptops. Also most people aren't like us, they want to use windows not linux.
Software as in which kind of software?
I love to work on new architectures so it would really help if you could specify what type of software is missing so I can see what I can do about it
> I was wondering if RISC-V could catch up AArch64 in the future
RISC-V is just an ABI specification; it's primary advantage is that designers can use it for free for their CPU designs; the actual challenge is the latter. As a hint to answer your question, have a look at the history of ARM, and how many big companies have spent how many years of continuous evolution of ARM based CPU/SoC implementations, until we had e.g. something like the Apple M2. And it's fair to assume that the ARM architectures continue to improve. So the same number of big companies would have to spend even more resources in RISC-V based architectures to catch up. It's not impossible, but it's pretty unlikely. Ultimately, the market will decide.
The other issues people state are valid. RISC-V might never catch up in the consumer market (although I wouldn't entirely rule it out eventually). But in the world of embedded systems, RISC-V absolutely has the potential to surpass competing architectures, although it's definitely an uphill battle. I've heard it's also viable for high performance computing, but tbh I'm not an expert and can't speak on that part of it.
The biggest issue is software. There is very little software in RISC-V. Furthermore, big companies don't have a lot of interest in RISC-V, so it's difficult to have high performance and cheap chips, manufacturing chips is very expensive so you need to scale business to be profitable. I don't know how it will be in the long run
https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png Currently 97% of debian packages build for RISC-V, it's 99% for arm, and 99.5% for x86_64. Once you've ported you code to more than one platform, as has happened with x86_64 to arm, it's mostly trivial to get it working on another platform. The biggest part that is missing imo is hand vectorized routines, but that's also slowly starting to catch up.
> The biggest issue is software Why? What software do you mean?
If you want ANY piece of software to run on multiple different architectures, you need completely different compilers for each architecture (at least the backend targets). It's not as simple as switching out your cpu, you need to compile your software into a completely different stream of code meant for that specific architecture. And it turns out to do this process well is really really hard. One of the main reasons it took so long for arm to be integrated into computers is because of software. putting apple aside, there were arm based windows machines as early as 2012, but the integration has always been garbage because there was never an incentive (up til now) to make the performance really good. You can make a cpu that is 10 times better than any other currently out there, but if you can't compile code to run on it then it might as well be a fancy paperweight.
We have complete and tested toolchains for RISC-V for many years, e.g. GCC or CLANG. That covers more than 80% of existing software (which requires these toolchain to build); even operating systems are available (e.g. Linux) which usually have the closest hardware dependency. From my point of view there is little software left which would not run on RISC-V. Thus my question. Your concerns seems to focus on desktop computers; but that's not (yet) the major market for ARM chips. We neither depend on Windows nor macOS in this market.
Able? Yes. Mature? I don't think so. Good windows support is absolutely necessary for arm to be successful in the computer market. At least from a consumer stand point.
ARM is unlikely to replace x86_64 Windows desktops. There is no advantage for customers to switch. Your concerns seem to focus on the Windows operating system. I agree that maturity of the OS for a specific architecture is essential; but if achieved (which is not that difficult, just remember the very many Unix variants on the different architectures, e.g. Solaris or Irix, which were all mature), recompiling existing software for the OS is not a big deal. Migrating from 32 to 64 bit architectures was a much bigger issue.
Sorry didn't notice that point, I agree there is no need for arm in desktops but I'm more focused on laptops. Also most people aren't like us, they want to use windows not linux.
Software as in which kind of software? I love to work on new architectures so it would really help if you could specify what type of software is missing so I can see what I can do about it
> I was wondering if RISC-V could catch up AArch64 in the future RISC-V is just an ABI specification; it's primary advantage is that designers can use it for free for their CPU designs; the actual challenge is the latter. As a hint to answer your question, have a look at the history of ARM, and how many big companies have spent how many years of continuous evolution of ARM based CPU/SoC implementations, until we had e.g. something like the Apple M2. And it's fair to assume that the ARM architectures continue to improve. So the same number of big companies would have to spend even more resources in RISC-V based architectures to catch up. It's not impossible, but it's pretty unlikely. Ultimately, the market will decide.