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I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hole point of a free ISA is that many different people can produce them so that it will reach a economy of scale and chip producers will face competition making dirving down price. Its not garantied to work but its a worty target.
Free is about freedom, not price.
Many people claim to want an open-source chip, but end up balking at its price tag, this is exactly why Raptor Engineering's Talos failed. [1] I've pretty much given up hope on a non-x86 based chip hitting our desktops, the closest to reach will be ARM. The economies of scale aren't there, I pretty much end up rolling my eyes at each of these articles. [1] https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php
Talos seemed amazing, and I was always fond of the ppc/power architecture and wished for something more modern than an old G5 mac, but $7k for a desktop is just more than even most early adopters are willing to do.
Is the intent for RISC-V to compete with modern high-end CPU designs, or do we just want to have royalty-free microprocessors for our embedded devices?
You might be surprised (at least I was) to learn that peripherals like hard drives and PCI-add-in cards usually have their own CPU executing their own software. Those processors are often MIPS/ARM/etc based and the manufacturer has to shell out to someone to be able to use that, even if they designed the processor themselves. I can see how this particular market is ripe for something like RISC-V. But does anyone expect RISC-V to really go head-to-head with Xeon, Opteron, ThunderX, Centriq?
I sound incredulous because this seems surprising to me, but I have no evidence to suggest whether it's as unlikely as I think. I've certainly seen open source software designs far superior to closed source ones, so maybe hardware design is no different?
I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
Others have the SiFive chip, but if you want to boot Linux then your best option currently is running Rocket on an FPGA kit. I expect that we'll soon have more options. If you just want to play around, then I'd recommend Spike or Fabrice's https://bellard.org/riscvemu/
I wonder how of those fit in a zedboard. (not going to ask how many hours of tool fighting that would require though).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now the arm SBCs actually make functional desktops. There's very little you can't do on a raspberry pi other than run closed software.
You can actually run Windows on a Raspberry Pi. Having said that, they make for horrible machines to do actual work on even with desktop Linux.
Many people claim to want an open-source chip, but end up balking at its price tag, this is exactly why Raptor Engineering's Talos failed. [1] I've pretty much given up hope on a non-x86 based chip hitting our desktops, the closest to reach will be ARM. The economies of scale aren't there, I pretty much end up rolling my eyes at each of these articles. [1] https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php
You have a point, but I think there is a reasonable midpoint that Talos missed altogether. RISC-V's move towards RPi/Arduino style mini-systems lets them get a market going at a price point that has some chance to get some uptake early, and hopefully grow from there. Talos seemed amazing, and I was always fond of the ppc/power architecture and wished for something more modern than an old G5 mac, but $7k for a desktop…
The PPC was a good brand but Intel out innovated them making faster x86 chips cheaper than PPC makers could. Apple had to move to Intel to compete with Intel PCs running Windows or Linux. Amiga still uses PPC but they are expensive.
Arm chips are so cheap to make that there is the $5 Raspberry PI Zero cheapest computer on a chip tech.
Risc-V would have to be priced like the Arm chips are, or else there would be no benefit to use them unless you like paying more for an open source chip that is free as in freedom and more expensive.
RISC-V is atleast 10 years away from competing with x86 and ARM. It is just now getting to a point where it can power arduino class hardware. Long way to go... but looks promising.