RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues • Hacker News Board

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#101

Post by dismalaf » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

red_admiral wrote: post #42

My money is still on ARM. They, and their clients who produce the actual processors, have options to fight back if RISC-V ever becomes a serious competitor for, say, smartphones.

Lol they tried to sue one of their biggest customers (Qualcomm) and lost... No one wants to deal with ARM, the licensing fees are insane, etc...

RISC-V is inevitable the same way Linux and open source were, because companies like Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, MediaTek, etc... would all be better off not paying ARM, all else being equal.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#102

Post by leoc » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #100

pjmlp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet to this day no major OS vendor, selling C and C++ compilers, has ever bothered with. Hardware memory tagging, via SPARC ADI, ARM MTE, CHERI has become a thing, before software based processes so far have failed adoption, and the OS vendors like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, rather go with hardware approach.

Major OS vendors have added loads of hardening to their C compilers. Not bounds checking specifically (because even if the overhead was only 20% that would be too high) but tons of other stuff such as: stack canaries, control flow integrity, hardened string functions, ASLR, zeroing uninitialized auto variables, forced warnings, linker hardening. These are added as standard in all decent Linux distros today. Probably…

But no-one's claiming that the techniques which have been widely deployed already are bad or unworthy or haven't made a positive difference. (Certainly I'm not!) However it's evident that they haven't made a sufficient difference (and while they have an overall low cost compared to other approaches all that effort to patch and make do isn't free either).

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#103

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #67

Headline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.

IMO “State of the union keynote argues” makes it pretty clear that this is a perspective from the person giving the keynote. The article title isn’t reporting it as a matter of fact, but as an argument.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#104

Post by dismalaf » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #65

Why can't anyone build a performant RISC-V cpu? The SpacemiT K3 seems to be the fastest available right now, and it's basically a joke. https://www.phoronix.com/review/spacemit-k3-pico-itx/3 I'm starting to get the feeling that there is something fundamentally broken in the RISC-V specification that fundamentally limits performance.

https://tenstorrent.com/newsroom/tenstorrent-sets-new-perfor...

It's already happening.

If you mean for consumer hardware though, it'll probably be a few more years. Even ARM hasn't really taken off for Windows. Hard to overcome developer inertia for consumer devices, whereas for datacenters it's easier as all the apps are custom anyway.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#105

Post by philistine » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

ak_111 wrote: post #83

speed_spread wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that ARM is pretty much theirs, or at least they have complete control over it, which they never did for any previous arch. They also handle chip production directly. Nothing in RISC-V could be worth more than what they can already wring out of ARM without having to migrate.

ten years is a very long time in technology, RISC-V ecosystem could be so vibrant and advanced that it might prove more cost effective for Apple just to feed off it (assuming Apple is still relevant by then). It's almost like trying to predict if the smartphone leaders in 2006 (Nokia / RIM) would want to adopt this new mobile operating system that hardly anyone uses (android) in 2016.

The thing is Apple designs its own ARM cores. They don't use the vibrant ecosystem of ARM for all the important parts of the CPU; they compete with it on their own and manage to win. They only pay a small amount per device for an architecture licence that's very generous for Apple, in large part because Apple was an initial seed investor and first customer of ARM.

If all the current investments in ARM don't suffice to beat Apple's own efforts, I don't see how they could ever need to use RiscV's community to achieve their goals.

As long as ARM keeps the architecture up-to-date and the fees minimal, Apple's staying.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#106

Post by nbf_1995 » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #89

PaulRobinson wrote: post #67

Headline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.

Currently, RISC-V actively shows up in embedded - especially "deep embedded" like specialized ASICs with embedded MCU cores. It's often seen displacing things like 8051, ARM Cortex-M0, ARC/ARCompact, Xtensa and oddball fully custom cores. It also starts to show up in low end Linux SoCs - often, again, purpose-specific ones, like SoCs for IP cameras or other single purpose consumer electronics like robot vacuums and d…

I can only hope RISC-V's displacement of ARM at the low end will force them into competing more at the high end in servers / high end consumer hardware.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#107

Post by ksec » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #67

Headline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.

[flagged]

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#108

Post by ksec » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 3:20 PM UTC

ak_111 wrote: post #83

speed_spread wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that ARM is pretty much theirs, or at least they have complete control over it, which they never did for any previous arch. They also handle chip production directly. Nothing in RISC-V could be worth more than what they can already wring out of ARM without having to migrate.

ten years is a very long time in technology, RISC-V ecosystem could be so vibrant and advanced that it might prove more cost effective for Apple just to feed off it (assuming Apple is still relevant by then). It's almost like trying to predict if the smartphone leaders in 2006 (Nokia / RIM) would want to adopt this new mobile operating system that hardly anyone uses (android) in 2016.

>ten years is a very long time in technology,

10 years is relatively short time in hardware, that is only at best 4 cycles. In today's world it is only 3 cycles. The amount of time, energy and resources required to switch from ARM to RISC-V only to save $100M a year makes very little sense. That is assuming you can get the same performance switching over in the first place. Which right now isn't the case in the next 5 years.

And I wouldn't be surprised ARM gives Apple some other patents protection as well as discount on other IPs.

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#109

Post by benj111 » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #107

PaulRobinson wrote: post #67

Headline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.

[flagged]

People criticise them all the time. Have you got any pertinent criticisms or is this all you have to say?

Re: RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

#110

Post by QuiEgo » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

PaulRobinson wrote: post #67

Headline could read: "RISC-V adoption is 'inevitable' according to RISC-V advocate at RISC-V conference to people who are invested in RISC-V who had come to hear about state of RISC-V adoption". I'm curious where the data is to support the argument. I am struggling to see the adoption appetite outside of niche applications where licensing costs of existing architectures are a key barrier.

Google is pushing it in embedded (OpenTitan/Ibex).