As a fellow risc-v supporter, I think the rise of arm is going to help risc-v software support and eventually adoption. They’re not compatible, but right now developers everywhere are working to ensure their applications are portable and not tied to x86. I imagine too that when it comes to emulation, emulating arm is going to be a lot easier than x86, possibly even statically recompilable.
This is what concerns me. ARM could dominate the market because almost everyone would develop apps supporting it and leave RISC-V behind. It could become like Itanium vs AMD64 all over again.
That is a risk on the Windows side for sure. Also, once an ISA becomes popular ( like Apple Silicon ) it will be hard to displace.
Repurposing Linux software for RISC-V should be easy though and I would expect even proprietary software that targets Linux to support it ( if the support anything beyond x86-64 ).
Itanium was a weird architecture and you either bet on it or you did not. RISC and ARM are not so different.
The other factor is that there is a lot less assembly language being used and, if you port away from x64, you are probably going to get rid of any that remains as part of that ( making the app more portable ).
Once a chip architecture gets popular on Windows, it will be hard to displace. ARM has already become popular on macOS ( via Apple Silicon ) so we know that is not going anywhere. If ARM becomes popular on Windows ( perhaps via X Elite ), it will be hard to displace as the more popular option. That makes RISC-V on Windows a more difficult proposition.
I do not think that RISC-V on Linux has the same obstacles other than that most hardware will be manufactured for Windows or Mac and will use the chips popular with those operating systems.
Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they’re supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture
Porting Windows exclusive games to Linux is a small step as well, but most developers don’t do it because they cannot justify the additional QA and debugging time required to port them over. Especially since Linux’s market share is small.
The reason Itanium failed was because the architecture was too different from x86 and porting x86 applications over required significant effort and was error prone.
For RISC-V to even get any serious attention from developers, I think they need to have appx 40-50% market share with OEMs alongside ARM. Otherwise, RISC-V will be seen as a niche architecture and developers would avoid porting their applications to it.
I’d rather see what RISC-V has to offer.
As a fellow risc-v supporter, I think the rise of arm is going to help risc-v software support and eventually adoption. They’re not compatible, but right now developers everywhere are working to ensure their applications are portable and not tied to x86. I imagine too that when it comes to emulation, emulating arm is going to be a lot easier than x86, possibly even statically recompilable.
This is what concerns me. ARM could dominate the market because almost everyone would develop apps supporting it and leave RISC-V behind. It could become like Itanium vs AMD64 all over again.
That is a risk on the Windows side for sure. Also, once an ISA becomes popular ( like Apple Silicon ) it will be hard to displace.
Repurposing Linux software for RISC-V should be easy though and I would expect even proprietary software that targets Linux to support it ( if the support anything beyond x86-64 ).
Itanium was a weird architecture and you either bet on it or you did not. RISC and ARM are not so different.
The other factor is that there is a lot less assembly language being used and, if you port away from x64, you are probably going to get rid of any that remains as part of that ( making the app more portable ).
Apple Silicon isn’t an ISA, it’s just ARM, what are you saying?
Once a chip architecture gets popular on Windows, it will be hard to displace. ARM has already become popular on macOS ( via Apple Silicon ) so we know that is not going anywhere. If ARM becomes popular on Windows ( perhaps via X Elite ), it will be hard to displace as the more popular option. That makes RISC-V on Windows a more difficult proposition.
I do not think that RISC-V on Linux has the same obstacles other than that most hardware will be manufactured for Windows or Mac and will use the chips popular with those operating systems.
Well right now most people develop apps supporting x86 and leaves everything else behind. If they’re supporting x86 + arm, maybe adding riscv as a third option would be a smaller step than adding a second architecture
It greatly depends on the applications.
Porting Windows exclusive games to Linux is a small step as well, but most developers don’t do it because they cannot justify the additional QA and debugging time required to port them over. Especially since Linux’s market share is small.
The reason Itanium failed was because the architecture was too different from x86 and porting x86 applications over required significant effort and was error prone.
For RISC-V to even get any serious attention from developers, I think they need to have appx 40-50% market share with OEMs alongside ARM. Otherwise, RISC-V will be seen as a niche architecture and developers would avoid porting their applications to it.
Exactly. Adding a third should be much simpler than a second.
Or what FPGAs have to offer.
Punch cards are gonna be back baby