alt Hacker NewsGiven how arm license is know to be less than friendly.... Wouldn't it be preferable to explore a RISCV architecture.
As far as I know RISC provides similar power efficiency and sleep that is like ARM.
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>arm license is know to be less than friendly
Sure, it's not open source or anything. But ARM doesn't seem to be a typical greedy incumbent that everyone hates. They don't make all that much profit or revenue given how much technology they enable - there isn't much to disrupt there.
RISC-V is severely lacking in high-performance implementations for the time being.
From the last interview question in the article (pertaining to Arm):
> We don’t really try to steer the market one direction or another; we just want to make sure that good options are always supported.
Sounds like their priority is to support Steam on the hardware consumers are currently using. Given that, it makes sense they'd go Arm in the Steam Frame, because Fex alone is already a massive undertaking, and Snapdragon is a leading mobile chipset for performance and power efficiency.
No one has yet produced a RISC-V CPU or SoC with truly competitive CPU and GPU performance and compatibility to the current state of arm64 or amd64.
That's a geopolitical question.
ARM is Western
RISC is China / Eastern
Valve is just trying to outflank Microsoft here. And they're doing a magnificent job of it.
Microsoft has on at least half a dozen occasions tried to draw a box around Valve to control their attempts to grow beyond the platform. And moreover to keep gaming gravitas on Windows. Windows Store, ActiveX, Xbox, major acquisitions ... they've failed to stop Valve's moves almost every time.
Linux, Steam Box, Steam Machine - there's now incredible momentum with a huge community with more stickiness than almost any other platform. Microsoft is losing the war.
The ARM vs RISC battle will happen, but we're not there yet. There also isn't enough proliferation for it to be strategic to Valve.
Have we seen a commercially available high performance 64-bit RISCV chip at production scale yet?
There’s a lot of work and experience built up for ARM through Proton and other tech (that can be reverse engineered to see how it works) like Rosetta. A lot of that would have to be redone for RISCV. Seems like a lot of risk in the short term for what’s not an obvious product benefit.
I would expect the high-end RISCV market to mature before a company like Valve dives in.