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Miniature RISC-V Developer Laptop Looks Like a Lenovo ThinkPad Clone | Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With their license, they have a huge amount of flexibility and are able to significantly customize the designs from ARM, letting them optimize in ways that Intel and AMD just wouldn’t allow.

An opportunity RISC-V will offer to anyone with a billion dollars lying around.

ARM, being a mature, and customizable RISC arch really should be able to chomp into x86 market share.

x86 market share is 99.999% driven by published software. Microsoft already tried expanding Windows, and being Microsoft, made half a dozen of the worst decisions simultaneously. Linux dorks (hi) have the freedom to shift over to whatever, give or take some Wine holdovers. Apple just dictated what would change, because you can do that when you're a petit monopoly.

What's really going to threaten x86 are user-mode emulators like box86, fex-emu, and qemu-user. That witchcraft turns Windows/x86 binaries into something like Java: it will run poorly, but it will run. Right now those projects mostly target ARM, obviously. But there's no reason they have to. Just melting things down to LLVM or Mono would let any native back-end run up-to-date software on esoteric hardware.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An opportunity RISC-V will offer to anyone with a billion dollars lying around.

Exactly this. Nvidia and Seagate, among others, have already hopped on this. I hold out hope for more accessible custom processors that would enable hobbyists and smaller companies to join in as well, and make established companies more inclined to try novel designs.

x86 market share is 99.999% driven by published software. Microsoft already tried expanding Windows, and being Microsoft, made half a dozen of the worst decisions simultaneously.

Indeed. I've read opinions that that was historically also a significant factor in PowerPC's failure - noone is going to want to use your architecture, if there is no software for it. I'm still rather left scratching my head at a lot of MS's decisions on their OS and device support. IIRC, they may finally be having an approach to drivers that's more similar to Linux, but, without being a bit more open with their APIs, I'm not sure how that will work.

Linux dorks (hi)

Hello! 0/

What's really going to threaten x86 are user-mode emulators like box86, fex-emu, and qemu-user. That witchcraft turns Windows/x86 binaries into something like Java: it will run poorly, but it will run.

Hrm...I wonder if there's some middle ground or synergy to be had with the kind of witchcraft that Apple is doing with their Rosetta translation layer (though, I think that also has hardware components).

Right now those projects mostly target ARM, obviously. But there's no reason they have to. Just melting things down to LLVM or Mono would let any native back-end run up-to-date software on esoteric hardware.

That would be brilliant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

IIRC Apple's ARM implementation has a lot of extensions that coincidentally work just like x86.

Frankly I'm gobsmacked at how many "universal binary" formats are just two native executables in a trenchcoat. Especially after MS and Apple both got deep into intermediate representation formats. Even a static machine-code-only segment would simplify the hell out of emulation.