Lately I’ve been really liking the idea of having something hosted on a RISC-V machine. RISC-V is a non-proprietary instruction set that is a competitor to ARM. The idea of having a something running on an open source operating system, running on an open standard CPU, served from my house, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I was under the impression that most Linux distributions were unstable on RISC-V. Turns out, I’m wrong about that. From a quick search, the following have official Debian images:
and the Pine64 Star64 has a community-maintained Armbian image.
Does anyone here have a RISC-V single-board computer doing anything practical for you?
That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.
It’s set for release in H2 of this year. This should be an actual desktop-class processor, performance-wise. Mini-ITX form factor too! The RISC-V processors are going through generations blazingly fast. Probably partly because we hobbyists get to do some QA.
I would caution though that this is still likely in the territory of “dev board”. Probably not going to be mainstream-ready and will have plenty of quirks. But, it’s a really big step forward.