Desktops, perhaps never - 10 years? Alibaba seem to be funding some R&D in this direction, but I'm not too familiar (and I can't speak Chinese). It's certainly possible, but desktop processors aren't simple in any way. Regardless of absolute technical excellence, RISC-V only has to be better than ARM (in both specification and implementation, and cost, of course) which will be a moving target as RISC-V improves.
Single Board Computers - https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed this seems to fit the bill. However, they don't seem to be selling those yet - the development kit for that particular CPU seems to be an FPGA soft-core.
I am currently working on an open-hardware project that requires a fair amount of grunt (or FPGA); in an effort to keep is open I was looking into RISC-V processor's. You can actually buy RISC-V hardware today as a guy on the street (i.e. Digikey etc.) but the offerings I could find were generally fast microcontrollers rather than general purpose processors.
If RISC-V is to be adopted it's probably more of a question of engineering knowledge and training than solely hardware: One of the chips I found in my search above is an interesting Chinese system on module that has a RISC-V at 400MHz, Wi-Fi, and a hardware NN coprocessor - it's a cool chip but even in Chinese the documentation is unusable and awful.
If a big western company like ST or Cypress etc. picks up RISC-V and starts making it easy and safe to actually use (for example, the section of the manual for the serial peripherals on most NXP microcontrollers is longer than all the documentation I could find for the aforementioned SoM).
The HiFive Unleashed was released (and for sale) back in 2018. From memory, there was a limited run (priced at US$1k each), as it was targeted to specific types of developers looking to do further work improving the platform.
For example, Red Hat bought some and used them for improving the RISC-V support in Fedora. From memory, Richard Jones (@rwmj here on HN) was involved with it.
for example, the section of the manual for the serial peripherals on most NXP microcontrollers is longer than all the documentation I could find for the aforementioned SoM
In Chinese though? Or did you compare long English to short Chinese?
Because, I don't speak (or read) it either, but compared to English it's extremely information sense: its characters are closer to whole words than to Latin letters. In fact if you think of it also being like German, with Longerwordbuiltfromothers, they are, and L... would be just a few characters at most.
Not that that makes Chinese documentation any more helpful to us non-speakers, though.
In Chinese though? Or did you compare long English to short Chinese?
I did some google translate-ing and had some help from my token Chinese friend. I might have missed it but the document had the same structure in English and Chinese. In short, you could probably work it out by reading the rtos they distribute for you to use and there is a little documentation of the actual peripherals but it is absolutely bare bones. And that's (what we would call) application notes, the actual datasheet is pretty much just some marketing BS and a PCB footprint (not that they actually provide any symbols - sometimes even the big chip makers don't bother which is quite annoying if you're stuck using anything other than Altium)
Others have pointed out economic problems with producing hardware, which is fair, but another big issue is standardization.
There is no RISC-V equivalent of BIOS / UEFI, multiboot, etc. We take it for granted that all motherboards and all bootable drives 'just work'. That kind of consistency is important for consumer desktop PCs (less so for rasberry-pi type machines).
This is being worked on, and I think a stable specifications are not too far away. I imagine it will still take firmware developers a long time to create motherboards that fit the spec, considering they are starting from scratch. Here is a recent presentation about the state of booting RISC-V[1].
The Unix platform spec group is working on this. Meetings every month. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unixplatformspec You have to join up as an individual membership, which is free for open source software developers.
We have open-source UEFI and openfirmware implementations already; is it really any more complicated then porting one and populating what I understand to be fairly standard interfaces for exposing device information to the operating system? Like... I'm sure it's not actually that easy, but what's the hard part once you've got working code execution from anyting resembling a normal compile chain?
Quite possibly; I only intended to comment on booting/firmware issues. It depends on your goal, too; I'd be quite happy to see RISC-V servers (headless) and desktops (separate video card). Basically, give me a 100% libre SoC/CPU+motherboard and I'm personally happy to worry about the rest later. Also depending on your specific goals and ideology, there's no reason you couldn't make a RISC-PI that just licensed a proprietary video core; that'd still make you more open-source than today's Pi, which has a proprietary CPU and GPU.
If I understood it correctly, that seemed to be the original goal of the lowrisc project, but it seems like it changed direction or it's just too much work. The founder I believe was involved in RPi.
(Please, instead of downvoting me, just correct me?)
Comments
Layman question: how many years before we get RISC-V desktops or Raspberry Pi like computers?
Desktops, perhaps never - 10 years? Alibaba seem to be funding some R&D in this direction, but I'm not too familiar (and I can't speak Chinese). It's certainly possible, but desktop processors aren't simple in any way. Regardless of absolute technical excellence, RISC-V only has to be better than ARM (in both specification and implementation, and cost, of course) which will be a moving target as RISC-V improves.
Single Board Computers - https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed this seems to fit the bill. However, they don't seem to be selling those yet - the development kit for that particular CPU seems to be an FPGA soft-core.
I am currently working on an open-hardware project that requires a fair amount of grunt (or FPGA); in an effort to keep is open I was looking into RISC-V processor's. You can actually buy RISC-V hardware today as a guy on the street (i.e. Digikey etc.) but the offerings I could find were generally fast microcontrollers rather than general purpose processors.
If RISC-V is to be adopted it's probably more of a question of engineering knowledge and training than solely hardware: One of the chips I found in my search above is an interesting Chinese system on module that has a RISC-V at 400MHz, Wi-Fi, and a hardware NN coprocessor - it's a cool chip but even in Chinese the documentation is unusable and awful.
If a big western company like ST or Cypress etc. picks up RISC-V and starts making it easy and safe to actually use (for example, the section of the manual for the serial peripherals on most NXP microcontrollers is longer than all the documentation I could find for the aforementioned SoM).
The HiFive Unleashed was released (and for sale) back in 2018. From memory, there was a limited run (priced at US$1k each), as it was targeted to specific types of developers looking to do further work improving the platform.
For example, Red Hat bought some and used them for improving the RISC-V support in Fedora. From memory, Richard Jones (@rwmj here on HN) was involved with it.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed
In Chinese though? Or did you compare long English to short Chinese?
Because, I don't speak (or read) it either, but compared to English it's extremely information sense: its characters are closer to whole words than to Latin letters. In fact if you think of it also being like German, with Longerwordbuiltfromothers, they are, and L... would be just a few characters at most.
Not that that makes Chinese documentation any more helpful to us non-speakers, though.
I did some google translate-ing and had some help from my token Chinese friend. I might have missed it but the document had the same structure in English and Chinese. In short, you could probably work it out by reading the rtos they distribute for you to use and there is a little documentation of the actual peripherals but it is absolutely bare bones. And that's (what we would call) application notes, the actual datasheet is pretty much just some marketing BS and a PCB footprint (not that they actually provide any symbols - sometimes even the big chip makers don't bother which is quite annoying if you're stuck using anything other than Altium)
Others have pointed out economic problems with producing hardware, which is fair, but another big issue is standardization.
There is no RISC-V equivalent of BIOS / UEFI, multiboot, etc. We take it for granted that all motherboards and all bootable drives 'just work'. That kind of consistency is important for consumer desktop PCs (less so for rasberry-pi type machines).
This is being worked on, and I think a stable specifications are not too far away. I imagine it will still take firmware developers a long time to create motherboards that fit the spec, considering they are starting from scratch. Here is a recent presentation about the state of booting RISC-V[1].
[1]https://content.riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Summit_...
The Unix platform spec group is working on this. Meetings every month. https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unixplatformspec You have to join up as an individual membership, which is free for open source software developers.
We have open-source UEFI and openfirmware implementations already; is it really any more complicated then porting one and populating what I understand to be fairly standard interfaces for exposing device information to the operating system? Like... I'm sure it's not actually that easy, but what's the hard part once you've got working code execution from anyting resembling a normal compile chain?
I suspect GPU / display controller and associated licensing and patents are an even bigger obstacle.
Quite possibly; I only intended to comment on booting/firmware issues. It depends on your goal, too; I'd be quite happy to see RISC-V servers (headless) and desktops (separate video card). Basically, give me a 100% libre SoC/CPU+motherboard and I'm personally happy to worry about the rest later. Also depending on your specific goals and ideology, there's no reason you couldn't make a RISC-PI that just licensed a proprietary video core; that'd still make you more open-source than today's Pi, which has a proprietary CPU and GPU.
Building A RISC-V Desktop https://hackaday.com/2019/02/11/building-a-risc-v-desktop/
If I understood it correctly, that seemed to be the original goal of the lowrisc project, but it seems like it changed direction or it's just too much work. The founder I believe was involved in RPi.
(Please, instead of downvoting me, just correct me?)
A decade at least. Nobody is mass producing consumer boards with RISCV. RasPi only happened cause broadcom had some very old chips to dump.