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0x000xca0xfe 4 hours ago

Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.

pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis

Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China.

Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

crote 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.

pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

If the chips aren't fast enough to run a JIT and AOT compiler, a concurrent copying generational GC, along with a modern Vulkan implementation, no one would care, they would be better with feature phones at that point.

0x000xca0xfe 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

They are already. I've got the Spacemit K3 and it is a bit below Sandy Bridge single-core speed - so nothing spectacular - but fast enough for everyday desktop use. And way faster than my old budget smartphone's SoC.

Yes RISC-V has not caught up to modern x86/ARM CPUs like Zen 5, Snapdragon or Apple but still fast enough for modern browsers and most software in general.

Already existing RISC-V CPUs are certainly fast enough to build entry level smartphones. It's probably just a matter of time (3-5 years maybe?) until some Chinese company does it.