• einlander@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    14 hours ago

    China has their in-house Longson chip and can use Risc-v. This has the potential of accelerating a switch from x86/arm to more open standards.

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      edit-2
      14 hours ago

      China’s biggest hurdle is not the ability to make a chip, but more the ability to get good yields. It’s more or less running into the same problem Intel did with 10nm, and what samsung has and the main reason why basically every chip maker is behind tsmc on bleeding edge.

      This has the potential of accelerating a switch from x86/arm to more open standards.

      hardware is a two way street, the other is getting a proper OS environment and people to be behind said projects. It’s not like RISC-V designs aren’t currently available.For example, Pine64’s risc-v options have been available in the market for quite some time now. And DeepComputing is trying to release its framework laptop equivalent board using a StarFive JH7110. It will only accelerate if there is a bodies available to create the ecosystem in it, and as of the moment, not many developers are putting effort into making it an ecosystem.

      An example of why hardware/software need to coexist is Snapdragon X Elite on Linux, as well as Asahi Linux(Arm based Macs on Linux). Neither are complete projects and do not hit the same performance their native OS versions hit yet remotely(nor efficiency). Theres a LOT you have to do to optimize hardware to the OS, and that just doesn’t happen instantly.