[LeFantome]

The RISC-V ISA can be fast.

Tenstorrent Ascalon, expected later this year, is expected to be AMD Ryzen 5 speeds. Tenstorrent hopes to achieve Apple Silicon speeds in a few years.

The SpacemiT K3 is about half as fast as Ascalon and available in April. K3 is 3-4 times faster than the K1 (previous generation).

This should give you an idea about how fast RISC-V is improving.

[adgjlsfhk1]

I'd be pretty surprised if Ascalon actually hits Zen 5 perf (I'm gessing more like Zen2/3 for most real world workloads). CPU design is really hard, and no one makes a perfect CPU in their first real generation with customers. Tenstorrent has a good team, but even the "simple" things like compilers won't be ready to give them peak performance for a few years.

[snvzz]

>I'd be pretty surprised if Ascalon actually hits Zen 5 perf

Certainly not in the Atlantis SoC, due to the older fab node used. Zen2-3 territory IPC is the expectation, with lower clocks than these actually got.

By the time they have the necessary scale to use the best fabs, they'll be tapping out something newer than the Ascalon that went into Atlantis.

Tenstorrent expects to reach parity with the best x86 and arm chips by 2028.

[brucehoult]

All RISC ISAs are basically the same thing as far as compiler optimisation is concerned, and there is 40 years of work into that already.

I can't see any reason why the father of Zen and the designer of the M1 can't make a core for the simpler RISC-V ISA with basically the same (or better) µarch than the M1.

[pjmlp]

Assuming AMD, Intel, ARM, Apple in a few years haven't released new CPUs, otherwise the difference is the same as today.