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> Wonder if any of the RISC-V cpus are fast enough as a daily driver running Linux? Short answer: Absolutely not, and you pretty much summarized it in your com

> Wonder if any of the RISC-V cpus are fast enough as a daily driver running Linux? Short answer: Absolutely not, and you pretty much summarized it in your comment. RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago.

Pet_Ant 2y ago
I mean maybe not many of us here, but my mom’s daily driver is a Chromebook. I SSH into my server using a Core 2 Dup laptop, that could be replaced.
- jermaustin1 2y ago
  When I was commuting 2 hours a day on the bus, my daily driver was an 8-inch iPad that I used with a logitec keyboard case tethered to my iPhone for internet, and would connect to my VSCode on my $10/mo droplet using Code-Server. If you offload the computer to the cloud, and don't need to do anything graphically intense, it makes daily driving an underpowered tablet very easy.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I mean, I keep a 10 year old MacBook in my kitchen/dining room. If someone were still actually making a high-end Chromebook that would be fine. Unfortunately with Google's departure from doing that hardware, it's all pretty much lower-priced educational market stuff and if I really needed a lightweight travel device, I'd get a tablet (which I did recently) or a MacBook Air. MacBooks are low enough maintenance that a good high-res Chromebook wouldn't really be enough cheaper or lighter to really buy you much.
brucehoult 2y ago
> RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago. What do you mean "still"? Those are brand new RISC-V CPUs, or were a year ago when they came out. The base RISC-V specification which the current cores implement (except the ones from the last couple of months) was not even formally frozen and published yet when the Pi 4 came out. Getting comparable RISC-V boards out in 4 years was a great effort. Note that the Pi 4 arrived eight years after the ARMv8-A spec was published. That original spec doesn't contain a lot of important things such as SIMD which make a huge difference to those Geekbench scores. They are not comparing like to like. By this time next year we'll have RISC-V boards performing better than the Pi 5, less than two years after it (possibly 1.5 years). A year after that, RISC-V things currently well into their design pipeline will be somewhere between Zen 1 and Apple M1 performance. The rate of progress is incredible. In the last 2-3 years many designers of current CPUs from Apple, Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm have moved to RISC-V companies.

Pet_Ant 2y ago

I mean maybe not many of us here, but my mom’s daily driver is a Chromebook. I SSH into my server using a Core 2 Dup laptop, that could be replaced.

jermaustin1 2y ago
When I was commuting 2 hours a day on the bus, my daily driver was an 8-inch iPad that I used with a logitec keyboard case tethered to my iPhone for internet, and would connect to my VSCode on my $10/mo droplet using Code-Server. If you offload the computer to the cloud, and don't need to do anything graphically intense, it makes daily driving an underpowered tablet very easy.
ghaff 2y ago
I mean, I keep a 10 year old MacBook in my kitchen/dining room. If someone were still actually making a high-end Chromebook that would be fine. Unfortunately with Google's departure from doing that hardware, it's all pretty much lower-priced educational market stuff and if I really needed a lightweight travel device, I'd get a tablet (which I did recently) or a MacBook Air. MacBooks are low enough maintenance that a good high-res Chromebook wouldn't really be enough cheaper or lighter to really buy you much.

brucehoult 2y ago

> RISC-V cpus are still at the performance level of Raspberry Pi 4, a $50 computer from five years ago. What do you mean "still"? Those are brand new RISC-V CPUs, or were a year ago when they came out. The base RISC-V specification which the current cores implement (except the ones from the last couple of months) was not even formally frozen and published yet when the Pi 4 came out. Getting comparable RISC-V boards out in 4 years was a great effort. Note that the Pi 4 arrived eight years after the ARMv8-A spec was published. That original spec doesn't contain a lot of important things such as SIMD which make a huge difference to those Geekbench scores. They are not comparing like to like. By this time next year we'll have RISC-V boards performing better than the Pi 5, less than two years after it (possibly 1.5 years). A year after that, RISC-V things currently well into their design pipeline will be somewhere between Zen 1 and Apple M1 performance. The rate of progress is incredible. In the last 2-3 years many designers of current CPUs from Apple, Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm have moved to RISC-V companies.