What do you think about that? Is the time for RISC-V come? I am not competent enough in the argument to judge…
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i wonder if motherboards and chips will be upradable in the L5 . I would think no atleast to the boards due to needing the same hardware layout to match the frame .
The Alibaba chip is designed for IoT applications which are plugged in, and can draw a lot of power. SiFive says that it will have a mobile SoC based on RISC-V in 2 years and a server CPU using RISC-V in 5 years. Millions of RISC-V cores are likely to go into future Western Digital drives, which is investing in SiFive, along with Intel and Qualcomm.
RISC-V is definitely going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that it will necessarily benefit us. The real question is whether the RISC-V CPU cores will be paired with components that run on free software. SiFive just signed an agreement with Imagination Technologies to use its PowerVR GPU and a neural processor, which both require proprietary drivers, so companies like Purism who want to use free software will avoid its mobile SoC, and the Alibaba probably will use other components which also require proprietary software.
It will probably be at least 5 years before the open hardware GPU that SiFive is developing will be ready. In other words, RISC-V is years away from helping our community.
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