It seems unlikely that I’ll ever use a risc-v system in anger, but I’m interested in them anyway because at heart I’m a hacker, which to me means (in part) that I’m interested in technology.
Until recently, the technology world has been shrinking relative to the 90s. I cut my teeth on machines running z80, 6502 and 68k CPUs, and during my early career I developed and deployed on 88k (DG/UX), PA-RISC (HP/UX), SPARC (Solaris and DRS/NX), MIPS (Irix) and probably a bunch I forget. Things were even more diverse (but less accessible) in earlier decades - each system had its own OS, and sometimes more than one (I’ve used RSTS/E on PDP and CSM on System 25...).
Today, everything in the commercial world runs x86 and Linux. That’s it. Even Windows people are using WSL now. There are loads of reasons why that’s good, but the hacker in me finds it dead boring.
So when I see things like M1 or Raspberry Pi or ESP8266 or RISC-V, it reminds me of a time when there was a lot more diversity in computing, where I could wonder about how things worked and read about them and imagine what applications I might have for them. It’s exciting! It gets my hacker juices flowing. And this is hacker news, right?
So despite the chances of me ever using risc-v in anger being approximately zero, I still think the whole thing is fascinating, and I learned heaps about CPUs just from people comparing RV to ARM and x64.
I think that’s the reason the “hype” for RISC-V is “so big”. It’s not because it’s going to be everywhere, but because it’s quite literally hacker news.
> I think that’s the reason the “hype” for RISC-V is “so big”. It’s not because it’s going to be everywhere, but because it’s quite literally hacker news.
Until recently, the technology world has been shrinking relative to the 90s. I cut my teeth on machines running z80, 6502 and 68k CPUs, and during my early career I developed and deployed on 88k (DG/UX), PA-RISC (HP/UX), SPARC (Solaris and DRS/NX), MIPS (Irix) and probably a bunch I forget. Things were even more diverse (but less accessible) in earlier decades - each system had its own OS, and sometimes more than one (I’ve used RSTS/E on PDP and CSM on System 25...).
Today, everything in the commercial world runs x86 and Linux. That’s it. Even Windows people are using WSL now. There are loads of reasons why that’s good, but the hacker in me finds it dead boring.
So when I see things like M1 or Raspberry Pi or ESP8266 or RISC-V, it reminds me of a time when there was a lot more diversity in computing, where I could wonder about how things worked and read about them and imagine what applications I might have for them. It’s exciting! It gets my hacker juices flowing. And this is hacker news, right?
So despite the chances of me ever using risc-v in anger being approximately zero, I still think the whole thing is fascinating, and I learned heaps about CPUs just from people comparing RV to ARM and x64.
I think that’s the reason the “hype” for RISC-V is “so big”. It’s not because it’s going to be everywhere, but because it’s quite literally hacker news.