Looking Towards the Future: FreeBSD on the RISC-V Architecture reddit / BSD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2021-11-05 01:27 RISC-V, until it has good conventional packed SIMD in the standard is useless in embedded and desktop markets. I appreciate people have the enthusiasm, but other open source, royalty-free archiectures (SPARC, OpenPOWER) aren't doing any better, and at least OpenPOWER is actually suitable for normal desktop workloads. RISC-V cultists (Not all supporters) claim that the vector extensions they have planned will be superior. The main edge vector extensions have is that they don't require recompilation for length. But unlike packed SIMD they're not as common, and furthermore, they're NOT COMPATIBLE with the leagues of extra codecs out there that use these. Everything from xvid to x264/x265 to VP9 all use standard packed SIMD functions to speed up decoding ops. The problem is RISC-V is an academic's playground, and they'll pile in useless features like 128bit integers and shit before they actually focus on standardizing the hard stuff. So if you want an expensive $700+ HiFive board that has the same CPU performance for those types of things as a 15-20 year old CPU or whatever, that's your business. Until RISC-V actually has good SIMD, it's simply not a great contender. That doesn't mean I don't want it to succeed, I absolutely do. I just wish the toxic academic elitism would leave it and they'd follow the pattern of say, POWER. otherwise, in a lot of applications it'll fail to gain good traction. The alternative would be for them to make those vector extensions work and part of the core standard, and they submitted code for nearly every codec produced since the MMX era to add support. Since that's unlikely... I don't know. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Tabsels · 2021-11-05 05:07 Edit: If you're going to be downvoting people who merely disagree with you then I'm done here. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2021-11-05 15:31 > Porting these codecs to RISC-V is going to require new code any way you spin it. Using vector instructions is not going to be very different from adapting to yet another SIMD-implementation's idiosyncrasies. It's easier to port across packed SIMD implementations. I'm not convinced of vector superiority. Edit: I dunno what youre on about regarding downvoting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- chainbreaker1981 · 2021-11-09 19:03 I'm still rooting for POWER. Main reason being it actually exists as a complete desktop computer already you can go out and buy right now for the price of less than half of a Mac Pro, for identical specs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RedditAlready19 · 2021-11-18 08:02 Does it use SBI? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Apprehensive-Top1182 · 2021-11-23 05:07 [https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/iscas\_2000\_riscv\_laptops/]( https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/iscas_2000_riscv_laptops/) There's going to be quite a few risc-v laptops coming out of china soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PunishedRaion · 2021-11-23 05:29 Why would I want to buy a piece of Chinese spyware? Serious question. Chip fabs from China aren't verifiied and on top of that are state- owned. Would you have bought a volkswagen in 1930s Germany? No? I won't buy or support shit coming from a country participating in the genocide of Muslims in Turkestan. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Apprehensive-Top1182 · 2021-11-23 12:42 That's true, however it shows that risc-v can be quite well suited for desktop workloads as well.