Comment by LeFantome
13 hours ago
RISC-V microcontrollers are inexpensive but “application” processors will be expensive until volumes increase.
Performance will get “good enough” over the next 2 years. Prices will drop after that.
13 hours ago
RISC-V microcontrollers are inexpensive but “application” processors will be expensive until volumes increase.
Performance will get “good enough” over the next 2 years. Prices will drop after that.
That the "good enough" SoCs will be arriving "over the next 2 years" is what the RISC-V advocates have told us for quite a few years now.
Well, part of “good enough” is features. The RVA23 profile was ratified a few months ago and the first chips are appearing now. That brings RISC-V to feature parity with X86-64 and ARM, including things like vector instructions and virtualization. QUbuntu 26.04 is compiled to require RVA23. So, the RISC-V advocates got that part right. Of course, the other side of “good enough” is performance.
The SpacemiT K3 has the multi-core performance of a 2019 MacBook Air and higher AI performance than an M4. That is better multi-core than an RK3588. If it were less expensive, the K3 would already be good enough for many people.
Alibaba has the C930 which is faster than the K3. We will see if it gets released to the rest of us.
Tenstorrent will release a chip in a few months that is twice as fast as the K3.
The recently announced C950 is supposed to be even faster but will be a year or more.
Of course, “good enough” is subjective but my statement was based on the above.
But you are right that there have been some false starts.
The SG2380 was just as fast as K3 and was ready to go two years ago. TSMC refused to manufacture it over US sanctions.
Ventana was about to release a very fast RISC-V chip but Qualcomm bought them.
Rivos was very close to releasing a RISC-V GPU but Meta bought them.
But even without these high-end chips, RISC-V is enjoying great success. It is taking over the microcontroller space. And billions of RISC-V cores are shipping.