While it’s clear that the most significant opportunities for RISC-V will be in democratising custom silicon for accelerating specific tasks and enabling new applications — and it’s already driving a renaissance in novel computer architectures, for e.g. IoT and edge processing — one question that people cannot help but ask is, so when can I have a RISC-V PC? The answer to which is, right now.
[…]The result is a RISC-V powered system that can be used as a desktop computer and thanks to the efforts of Atish Patra at Western Digital, installing Fedora Linux is a breeze. This is obviously not exactly commodity hardware, but it does show that the ingredients are there and the combination provides a powerful development platform for anyone who might want to prototype a RISC-V PC — or indeed a vast array of other applications which stand to benefit from the open ISA.
This has me very excited. Over the last few decades, virtually all competitors to x86 slowly died out – SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, etc. – which turned desktop computing hardware into a rather boring affair. Recently we’ve been seeing more and more ARM desktop boards, and now it seems RISC-V is starting to dabble in this area too.
Great news.
PowerPC on the desktop coming back ?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTLsS_QZ8us&t=32m32s
And laptop ?:
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/
Or: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html
Speaking of ARM, the Pine64 folks are making an RK3399 laptop for $199.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/01/30/the-new-pinebook-pro-will-challenge-google-chromebooks-for-199/
Looking good, finally a notebook I’d invest into. Provided it is documented enough not to depend on binary blobs.
It’s based around the RK3399, so support for everything but the GPU is mainline, and the GPU driver stack is beginning to get mainlined. I will probably get one myself if my wheezy old Thinkpad ever dies.
Still, it’s sad there’s no “open” GPU out there, most notably in the ARM world. You have plenty of ARM implementation, all rather well documented, but no “open” GPU to fit with.
PowerPC is very much still alive. I was going to say to qualify with “desktop x86”, but then SPARC wasn’t a desktop processor either. So if we’re talking about all common architectures, desktop or otherwise, then Power has not died out.
Correction: there were SPARC desktop/workstation systems. Forgot about those.
PowerPC (actual PPC, not IBM POWER) is only really alive in the embedded market right now, and I’m willing to bet part of that is that it’s one of the few ISA’s you can reliably get radiation hardened CPU’s in. There are still some rare desktop systems out there that use it, but most companies wouldn’t even consider using them because they can’t run Windows.
PowerPC is very much alive in the server market. Why don’t you consider IBM POWER to be PowerPC?
Because PowerPC and POWER processors are not the same thing… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
From the last paragraph of the abstract:
They are branches of a common trunk, but are not the same processor architecture.
Intel P6 and AMD K7 are not the same architectures, but they are still x86.
POWER is in fact an implementation of the PowerPC instruction set.
Nobody would suggest the Mac G5 machines aren’t PowerPC – they are indeed IBM POWER4 chips.
IBM POWER chips implement the same ISA as Freescale PowerPC chips. Specifically, Freescale’s (Part of NXP) latest PowerPC core, the e6500, implements PowerISA 2.07, the same as IBM’s POWER8.
POWER9 implements PowerISA 3.0. NXP doesn’t have any parts out that do that, yet.
So, yes, IBM POWER is PowerPC.
UltraSparc desktops did exist (I have one, a Sun Blade 150, which is most certainly not what it sounds like). But yeah, they were quite uncommon later on.
Back when high-end systems meant RISC workstations, UltraSPARC desktops were quite common. Look at any show on astronomy filmed in the early 2000’s, and it’s all UltraSPARC workstations on every desk.
PPC has better support (software and I assume hardware) for real time applications. WIndows is not as vital in that arena. Sony uses a. Freescale PPC in the PS4 VR add-on where low latency is a key attribute.
You would think that porting from PPC to RISC-V would be easier between two RISC processors than from a CISC processor?? RISC-V Amiga here we come!
Since each CPU type requires all ASM to be rewritten (often even in the case of CPUs which are related, such as x86 and amd64), and even then most code isn’t written in ASM anyway and instead would be dependent on factors like endianness and alignment, it doesn’t make much difference going from something like PPC to RISC-V or amd64 to RISC-V.
Understood and thank you. In a sense the act of porting an OS more or less obliterates any user level trace of the CPU architecture, security vulnerabilities aside. Line Intel, you would have to put a big sticker on the outside to remind you of what’s inside, unless you plan to break out an assembler.