Help me understand this better.
From what I have read online, since arm just licenses their ISA and each vendor’s CPU design can differ vastly from one another unlike x86 which is standard and only between amd and Intel. So the Linux support is hit or miss for arm CPUs and is dependent on vendor.
How is RISC-V better at this?. Now since it is open source, there may not be even some standard ISA like arm-v8. Isn’t it even fragmented and harder to support all different type CPUs?
Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I really don’t find the “chip makers don’t have to pay licence fees” a compelling argument that RISC-V is good for the consumer. Theres only a few foundries capable of making CPUs, and the desktop market seems incredibly hard to break into.
I imagine it’s likely that the cost of ISA licencing isn’t what’s holding back competition in the CPU space, but rather its a good old fashioned duopoly combined with a generally high cost of entry.
Of course, more options is better IMO, and the Linux community’s focus on FOSS should make hopping architectures much easier than on Windows or MacOS. But I’d be surprised if we see a laptop/desktop CPU based on RISC-V competing with current options anytime soon.
Efficiency too. I think RISC-V is mostly not made by these companies, which is why their efficiency is below x86_64 and performance is below an Intel Core 2 Duo
So RISC-V is less performant and less efficient? That’s opposite to what I heard about it, at least for the efficiency.
Compared to ARM, so makes total sense.