[flurrything]

Jokes aside. Since February you can already buy RISC-V SoCs that run Linux... at pretty high prices, e.g., https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed costs 1000$ bucks and the expansion board costs 2000$...

Still not practical for the masses, but not more expensive than similar extravagant architectures like PowerPCs (IIRC a PowerPC9 desktop system costs about 9000$ today).

Someone joked that you could get a 30$ xeon system on ebay from a couple of years ago that would crush these on pretty much any benchmark, but who knows, maybe some day riscv chips will become cheaper and more powerful. What we are seeing in the market today are the very first such systems, from the very first vendors.

[bmcusick]

Oh, I'm sure that there will be hobbyists who do this. Just like there are people who run Arch on their home PC, or automate their house with Arduinos. The joke about "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is predicting mass consumer adoption. That doesn't seem too likely, unless someone like Apple or Google decides to move their stack over to silicon they can design and control in-house without need for ARM's long term support.