Sam Trenholme’s blog
RISC-V will eventually take over
August 16, 2026
I explain why the future of computing is the RISC-V.RISC-V
RISC-V is an open source ISA (an ISA, or instruction set architecture, is the language a given chip understands) which, unlike x86_64 and ARM, is free for anyone to implement and use.
I believe there will come a day when RISC-V has comparable or better performance than ARM and x86_64.
This is based on history: I remember when x86 performance compared to
the DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. was a joke. There was a time when,
if you wanted real performance, you needed to pony up $20,000-$50,000
for a workstation with a MIPS/ However, people were buying x86 computers at a far higher rate,
giving Intel (and AMD) the money needed to invest in better chip
designs and better fabs. Linux was, at the same time, gaining traction
and, around the time the dot-com bubble popped and there were no longer
companies with the money needed to get Sun SPARC workstations (or what
not) at $50,000 or more a pop to start up a web business, x86 computers
running Linux had nearly the same performance at a much lower price.
Once the Itanium sank and x86_64 was mainstream, x86_64 was the ISA of
choice for performance workstations and servers, and the RISC ISAs that
survived were now mainly used in the embedded space. Indeed, ARM was
never a high performance RISC processor, and it was the one that took
over the embedded space while PA-RISC, Alpha, and SPARC died.
The ISA for what were cheap computers became the highest performance
ISA around.
It has been only in the 2020s that RISC processors have gotten x86_64
levels of performance, notably in the the Apple M series of processors.
So now ARM, an ISA which was geared for cheap embedded devices, has
become a high performance processor, in line with x86.
Right now, RISC-V is mainly being used in cheap embedded components.
Considering that x86 and ARM also were made for cheap computing, until
becoming the dominant high end processor, history tells us that the
cheapest ISA is the one which will become the highest performance one.
RISC-V currently has about the same performance as a high end
Raspberry Pi. I predict it will have medium-level PC performance by the
end of the 2020s.
“Hacker news” has a thread
about the RISC-V in response to another thread
based on an article criticizing RISC-V. This blog
entry is based on a response I wrote at Hacker News.
Further reading