This is really great!
Just checked and on my AMD Ryzen 5 the GIMP lava render took 5 seconds (compiled Appimage version) or 10 seconds (every damn other version, no idea why).
So the liechi Pi is a third of that speed, which is pretty damn impressive!
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 4•10 months ago
Indeed. If you did performance per watt, it would show even better.
The critical thing I saw here is that a RISC-V board is now outperforming a Pi 4. The price / performance just has to improve a bit more and RISC-V will be a viable alternative in the SBC market. I see it moving to laptops and tablets pretty quickly after that.
Totally independently, there are people trying to make RISC-V work for servers. As ARM has not really succeeded there, RISC-V may even beat them to it.
The place that I expect ARM to continue to dominate for quite some time is Phones. And x64 is not going anywhere for desktop and probably gaming for quite some time.
Performance / watt matters though and, as RISC-V improves, the long term picture for ARM especially gets pretty cloudy.
Pretty encouraging progress. Soon RISC V will be a viable platform for regular users.
How hard is the initial setup for this board? Is it a simple flash an sdcard and power it, or does it require manual kernel crosscompiling of some specific unmaintained github fork? I know Debian is working on offcial riscv support but I haven’t looked at how far its come along in a bit.
How long until Apple adopts RISC-V?
They already are, just not as main processors. They’re using it for all the microcontrollers that are essential in modern computers.
My guess would be at least 10 years. They just switched processors, so I don’t think they will do it again in the near future. Maybe for some devices they’ll do it earlier.
Off the top of my head…
Late 90s moved from Motorola 68k to Power PC.
Early aughts moved from PowerPC to Intel x86.
2020’s moved from Intel x86 to ARMv8.
It feels like 10 years is a good prediction for when they’ll shift everything again.
I’m no fan of Apple, but without a behemoth to force adoption of new architectures, we’d be stuck in the x86 duopoly for the indefinite future.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 3•10 months ago
This one may last longer. They did not just move to ARM. They make their own chips now. Also, they are leveraging this across not just desktop / laptop but mobile too.
Apple has never transitioned on the iPhone or iPad. They have always been ARM. Now they are Apple silicon as well.
I think it’s far more likely the chinese companies will lead the risc-v parade, they’re bullish on being more independent, for good reason
Apple has a unique deal with ARM that puts them in an unusually strong market position at the moment. The odds of them trading that out for an open-source platform are effectively nil, barring massive market shifts that make it inevitable.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 2•10 months ago
Apple makes their own silicon these days. There is almost zero incentive to switch and a bunch of switching costs that they have not even completed after moving away from Intel.
Apple is not going to switch anytime soon. Even if RISC-V started to dominate on the desktop ( a long, long road ), Apple would stick with ARM.
Hopefully the day of RISC-V overthrowing x86 is sooner than we think. Progress on development has been fast and it’s very exciting.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 1•10 months ago
It is likely to overthrow ARM before taking over from x86. Even if it does dominate ARM though, things like Apple Silicon ( which uses the ARM ISA ) are going to be with us for a while.