And wine/proton will integrate with this or some similar solution for running x86 binaries.
Even if not at the consumer level, having your data center, for example, running a cheaper (I assume since no license for the instruction set means not having to pay for it and more options to buy from leading to lower prices) and less power demanding option when compared to x86-64 sounds enticing to me.
Maybe no one wants to be the genea pig to iron out the kinks of the transition or maybe the raw performance of x86 is bigger deal than I think it is and its worth the price and power. Dunno.
For me, it's because the ecosystem has fragged even harder than Xtensa, who will sell you custom CPUs. THead made yet another vector unit that's required to approach anything near the Intel/AMD moat numbers.
SpecInt/GHz last year was around half of Intel/AMD/ARM numbers.
The imminent demise of CISC has been trumpeted from the rooftops for at least the last 30 years...
Additionally, if you want to get super technical (as if there were ever a real delineation between RISC/CISC), both AMD and Intel decode x86 into internal micro-ops which are essentially RISC.
So, for all intents and purposes, CISC is dead and buried.
It's very simple!
Because the amount of time it takes to design and produce a data centre level CPU microarchitecture is greater than the time RISC-V extensions needed for data centre CPUs have existed.
The original RISC-V specification was ratified less than six years ago, but you really couldn't create a data centre CPU until at least RVA22, ratified two years ago in March 2023 -- or preferably RVA23 which was ratified in October 2024 and has the features needed for efficient hypervisors.
You can knock out a microcontroller CPU core in a weekend, but something to compete with current Apple, AMD, Amazon etc CPUs takes a long time to make. Most companies doing that started work only in 2021 or 2022.
It is simply too soon. A lot of stuff is in the pipeline.
I cannot way for the first AAA games to run on ultra-performant RISC-V(RV23+) microarchitectures made with the state-of-the-art silicon process.
badmonster•10h ago
westurner•9h ago
"lsteamclient: Add support for ARM64." https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/8ff40aad6ef00... .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43847860
/? box86: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
"New box86 v0.3.2 and Box64 v0.2.4 released – RISC-V and WoW64 support" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37197074
/? box64 is:pr RISC-V is:closed: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64/pulls?q=is%3Apr+risc-v+is%3...