Comment by mooracle
1 month ago
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward. High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
Indeed. With Ascalon, we will exit this year with RISC-V chips as fast as anything available from ARM themselves (eg. not Qualcomm or Apple Silicon).
The SpaceMIT K3 launched yesterday and Milk-V is advertising an SBC based on it (Jupiter2). It has single core performance about the same as a Pi 4 but with multi-core performance of more than double the Pi 4. And at 60 TOPS, it has the AI performance of a Jetson Orin Nano.
That is this year. The next ring to reach for will be true desktop level performance.
As RISC-V becomes truly useful, volumes will go up and prices will go down. With a dozen interesting players designing and building RISC-V chips, the pace of innovation is not going to slow down. I honestly do not know how ARM is going to keep up.