This CPU excites me greatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
Does anyone have any idea what needs to happen in order for it to become available to end-users and home users?
When the x86 monopoly dies, maybe.
the heat death of the universe
If only I had the time.
For one cheaper, for two better fabs, for three more cache, fer four socketable for mobo’s, for five mobo’s. Then you need gpu’s to work with it, then an os, then devs.
You’re more likely to game on a ppc mac.
Actually, you are more likely to game on a Mac with ARM.
A few things…
First, gaming is “special”. Look at the number of games still running i386 code 10+ years after the release of AMD64. It’s a lot.
The reason is, most games are proprietary software shipped as pre-compiled binaries rather than source. In order to play those games at all, the developer will need to release the source code, provide additional binary builds, or wrap the game in an emulation layer. Emulation layers currently exist (i.e. qemu) for cross-platform wrapping like this, but there can be a serious performance hit. If the game studio that made the game is also out of business, the odds are closer to “never”.
But let’s say that they learned their lesson and have done something for RISC-V that didn’t happen for AMD64, there’s still the issue of drivers.
Like the games themselves, you’ll need functional drivers. Intel and AMD have open source drivers, and there’s a well-supported community driver for nvidia, but isn’t yet a serious consideration for gaming due to performance.
That’s all with the understanding that because there’s no Windows port for RISC-V, you’ll be gaming on Linux.
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Also, while a nitpick, it’s important to understand that it’s an ISA (Instruction set architecture), not a CPU. It doesn’t define how to implement a CPU, only how it should behave (generally).
If AMD or Intel would decide to use that ISA for their new line of products, it doesn’t mean the hardware is “open-source” as the implementation of it can easily be proprietary.
/interjection
Now about the Gaming on it. If you mean like the one we have atm on PCs, I highly doubt that’s coming even in mid-to-long term future. There is no monetary incentive to do so, because there are no RiSC-V users to sell games to. And that is because there are no RISC-V CPUs out there that are powerful enough to play games.
And there are nobody even thinking about doing CPUs that use RiSC-V at all. All I seen so far are MCUs, and soft-cores for FPGAs.
nvidia is replacing their GPU/SoC logic controllers with a core based on RISC-V iirc
so ironically we may see risc-V in GPUs in our gaming long before we do anywhere else
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I say “never”, it’s a chicken and egg thing again, no incentive to create games because there is “no hardware” (yes there is just not in the sense like with x86) and no incentive to create “hardware” because there are no games/software.
Almost the same with gaming on Linux, unless some company pushes it heavily that has some “good” influence nothing will happen.