What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical

I stopped listening to what Canonical says. They often get involved in things and disturb the ecosystem then abandon stuff or dig a "not invented here" hole.

Unity, Bazaar, Mir, Upstart, Snap, etc.

All of them had existing well established projects they attempted to uproot for no purpose other than Canonical wanted more control but they can't actually operate or maintain that control.

I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years

Will RISC-V end up with the same (or even worse) platform fragmentation as ARM? Because of absence of any common platform standard we have phones that are only good for landfill once their support lifetime is up, drivers never getting upstreamed to Linux kernel (or upstreaming not even possible due to completely quixotic platforms and boot protocols each manufacturer creates). RISC-V allows even higher fragmentation in the portions of instruction sets each CPU supports, e.g. one manufacturer might decide MUL/DIV are not needed for their CPU etc. ("M" extension).

Not my area of expertise but what exactly is the difference between RISC-V and Power PC? Didn't Power-PC get a good run in the 90s and 2000s? Just wondering why there's renewed interest in RISC-like architectures when industry already had a good exploration of that area.

> Enabling new business models

This is true, but only for the bigger players. The nature of hardware still fundamentally favors scale and centralization. Every hyper-scalar eventually gets to a size that developing in-house CPU talent is just straight up better (Qcom and Ventana + Nuvia, Meta and Rivos, Google's been building their own team, Nvidia and Vera-Rubin, God help Microsoft though). This does not bode well for RISC-V companies, who are just being used as a stepping stone. See Anthropic, who does currently license but is rumored to develop their own in-house talent [1].

> Extensibility powers technology innovation

>> While this flexibility could cause problems for the software ecosystem...

"While" is doing some incredible heavy lifting. It is not enough to be able to run Ubuntu, as may be sufficient for embedded applications, but to also be fast. Thusly, there are many hardcoded software optimizations just for a CPU, let alone ARM or x86. For RISC-V? Good luck coding up every permutation of an extension that exists, and even if it's lumped as RVA23, good luck parsing through 100 different "performance optimization manuals" from 100 different companies.

> How mature is the software ecosystem?

10 years ago, when RISC-V was invented, the founders said 20 years. 10 years later, I say 30 years.

The nature of hardware as well, is that the competition (ARM) is not stationary as well. The reason for ARM's dominance now is the failure of Intel, and the strong-arming of Apple.

I have worked in and on RISC-V chips for a number of years, and while I am still a believer that it is the theoretical end state, my estimates just feel like they're getting longer and longer.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-weighs-building-i...

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