I keep checking in on Tenstorrent every few months thinking Keller is going to rock our world... losing hope.

At this point the most likely place for truly competitive RISC-V to appear is China.

Findecanor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Tenstorrent is supposedly taping out 8-wide Ascalon processors as we speak, with devboards projected to be available in Q2/Q3 this year.

BTW. Keller is also on the board of AheadComputing — founded by former Intel engineers behind the fabled "Royal Core".

	▲	topspin an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K. That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.
	▲	snvzz 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Ascalon tape out Supposedly happened earlier this year. Tenstorrent says devboards in Q3. Now we just wait.

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rbanffy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> At this point the most likely place for fast RISC-V to appear is China.

Or we just adopt Loongson.

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balou23 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.

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bonzini 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LoongArch is, on a first approximation, an almost RISC-V user space instruction set together with MIPS-like privileged instructions and registers.

	▲	mananaysiempre 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wait, this is a modern-ish ISA with a software-managed TLB, I didn’t realize that! The manual seems a bit unhappy about that part though: > In the current version of this architecture specification, TLB refill and consistent maintenance between TLB and page tables are still [sic] all led by software. https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...

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pantalaimon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They did get rid of the delay slots and some other MIPS oddities

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mananaysiempre 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But legally distinct! I guess calling it Ｍ○ＰＳ was not enough for plausible deniability.

	▲	genxy 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ISAs shouldn't be patentable in the first place.

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throawayonthe 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)