[technerder]

Really hoping for RISC-V to take off and become a viable and mainstream alternative for consumer desktop machines so we can have a modern, fully open, and customizable computer.

[throwawaylinux]

RISC-V doesn't mandate an implementation's hardware and firmware stack be fully open, does it?

[mhh__]

Not at all

[octoberfranklin]

I would love to believe in this, but in practice RISC-V has only gained traction in 32-bit microcontrollers, from companies that simply don't want to pay for an ARM license.

If there is a riscv64 server/workstation out there that I can buy, today, I would love to order one.

[pabs3]

SiFive are the closest to that.

[octoberfranklin]

Which is what is so depressing.

They're the "closest", but not remotely close.

[pabs3]

They have more RAM than my current desktop, so probably they are good enough for many people :)

[octoberfranklin]

Can you be more specific? Like which model you mean?

AFAICT all the SiFive products that are available to purchase and have workstation-ish amounts of RAM require boot blobs. I would be happy to be wrong about this.

https://forums.sifive.com/t/remaining-agency-issues-to-be-so...

Apparently there was a very limited run of dev boards for which no blobs are needed, and then they promptly discontinued that product and replaced it with a (confusingly-similarly-named) blobbified product that you can pre-order via mouser (listed as "backordered, no ETA"). This product is already marked EOL which is not encouraging.

[pabs3]

I was just referring to their latest dev boards, which people have put in standard mini-ITX compatible cases, plugged in GPUs and used as workstations. Zero idea what blobs this requires. For eg:

https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/15/2022-01-15-The-RISC-V-exp...

[Aurelius3]

Isin't risc mainly for embedded systems and low power usage?

[alpaca128]

ARM is a RISC architecture and enough to power Apple's Macbooks. Low power can also indicate high efficiency.