I’m planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
It shouldn’t be hard by 2030 I imagine; particularly if you primarily or exclusively use open source software. The RVA23 chips announced I usually see people comment them as having synthetic benchmark scores at about the Apple M1 level. I regularly use a laptop with a Skylake dual core in it and a Raspberry Pi 5 run off a microsd rather than a m.2 NVME hat. With that in mind, if RISC-V designs don’t get any better than that in the next 4 years, they’ll still be better than hardware that I will still be using. I still use a Raspberry Pi 3. At work every now and then I’ll throw a gitlab runner on a 10 year old desktop to have another thing building when things are busy
There are RISC-V developer boards today with PCI-E slots that you can throw in pretty much any AMD graphics card. The big distributions Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat - they all support risc-v. felix86 is equivalent to box64 and FEX for x86 to ARM:
https://felix86.com/felix86-26-04/
Software support is solid already today. It’s hardware availability for the announced RVA23 designs that’s not mature yet. 4 more years and I imagine in most cases the experience of Linux on RISC-V hardware not being much different than on ARM or x86 hardware