@mntmn your profile mentions RISCV which tells me you got some passion for that topic, but I checked your website and I see no mention of RISCV there. Do you have any plans for that in the future? For the laptop which you are selling.

@darth what i did so far in regards to risc-v:
— https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.html
— https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=The_road_to_fully_open_hardware_mobile_computing

@mntmn is that "Abstract" paragraph your sentence? I wholeheartedly agree with it.

@darth yes, it is the abstract of my keynote speech which is linked there

@mntmn would you dare guessing when will RISC V chips be ready for laptops?

I will explain what I mean by "ready". Snapdragon ARM chips from a couple of years ago were attempted in laptops, but nobody wanted them. They were underwhelming for desktop usage. The new X Elite now seems to have jumper a couple of generations and is now ready for even mainstream.

StarFive JH7110 seems to be weaker than RaspberryPi 4, and Pi is a bit of a stretch in terms of desktop compute power. At least the RPi4.

@mntmn do you think you will be able to use RISC V in your laptops in the next couple of years and call it an end-user-ready product?

@darth i don't know and i don't have good data for guessing. maybe next year? also, will they have slightly competitive GPUs with open source drivers (mesa)? otherwise, it's not worth for us to integrate vs ARM, as most people will try it for a few days and then it'll end up in a drawer because it's too slow.

as for GPUs, we're only now approaching really interesting terrain on ARM with higher-end mali and panthor/panvk, or adreno with qualcomm (qc chips are quite complicated though)

@darth no idea because i don't have insider info @ what's going on with risc-v chip manufacturers.

@mntmn I am typing this on a trusty ThinkPad T480. I would love to have something like this, but with much longer battery life. Obviously ARM is promising, but if it would be an open platform it would be even better.

@darth one thing i don't understand though is why people call the current risc-v socs more open than arm socs. only because you don't pay royalties for the isa doesn't make the design open, i.e. the sifive perf cores are not open and neither is the rest of the IP in those chips

@tagemori @darth i know this (see above) and that's cool, but it has not translated at all into open risc-v socs (that could be used for general purpose computing)

@mntmn because the instruction set architecture is open-source? Of course you knew that and your question was directed at the end product, I understand, but I am not qualified to answer. The only thing I can answer would sound political and not technical.

I guess that's relevant to users if you have a spare silicon fab. What really matters is open specs for the instruction set and peripherals, and the situation there is about the same for arm and risc-v.

CC: @mntmn@mastodon.social

@darth @mntmn RISC-V can be put in laptops right now, but all existing SoCs have a weakness in the form of PowerVR GPUs.

@mntmn @darth There are some fully open RISC-V cores. You can't really make fully open ARM core.