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cbolton • today at 11:41 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

So it's late to deliver hugely complex cores according to some optimistic timeline? That's a weird measure of success. The ISA is successful in the low end and is seeing huge investment on large cores, though most of the promising companies are now focusing on AI or getting bought by large players like Qualcomm. So yeah it might take a while still before we see competitive high end consumer cores. I would still put my money on RISC-V rather than Loongson for the long term but we'll see.


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kjs3 • today at 2:11 PM

That's a weird measure of success.

It's a far better measure than "despite all the years of unfulfilled hype and promises we'll absolutely have a smorgasbord of performant RISC-V cores Real Soon Now". Single core performance down in the Intel Core range? Needs 96 cores to even be competitive on a handful of benchmarks that don't equal a modern users compute needs? The competition isn't sitting on their hands, and RISC-V hasn't delivered the performance it's fanbois have told us is 'inevitable'. Loongson has at least managed late-2010s levels of performance.

Maybe RISC-V will completely take over the embedded market. That's not a bad gig. High volume, tho slim margins, lot's of niches for lots of innovation (want to continue to go crazy with ISA extension? Not a big deal in the embedded world). But they're still selling billions of 8051s, ARM is ubiquitous but even they didn't take over that world, and I know how I would lay my bets there, too.

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