• @pkill
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    4 months ago

    Apparently there are multiple crates but no official toolchain so unsure how that works in practice. You’re still limited to either waiting for hours or cross-compiling though since currently the best available RISC-V CPU is quad-core 2.5 GHz (which still looks hella promising, 2 years ago best we had was 1.5 GHz dual-core). This blog post by Drew DeVault goes into detail of how daily driving RISC-V looked like 2 years ago. I suppose these days it looks noticeably better, especially since Samsung and Apple have been eyeing RISC-V adoption due to ARM consortium doing some monopolistic shit with their licensing. But eventually, so far, not enough critical mass was attained and afaik the whole drama mellowed out a bit.

    Regarding the energy efficiency, some experimental units managed to even be manifold better at this:

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/new-risc-v-cpu-claims-recordbreaking-performance-per-watt/

    But on the other hand, studies involving some RISC-V models show quite the contrary when it comes to energy efficiency, although the thermal performance is much better:

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11227-024-05946-9

    And below is a screenshot from a comparison by Gary Explains using more microcontroller models. So it really depends on the specific model, but it seems like the design of RISC-V has some solid potential to beat ARM in terms of energy and thermal efficiency.

    • @[email protected]
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      14 months ago

      I didn’t know there was no RISC-V toolchain for Rust, that’s kinda weird!

      You’re still limited to either waiting for hours or cross-compiling though since currently the best available RISC-V CPU is quad-core 2.5 GHz (which still looks hella promising, 2 years ago best we had was 1.5 GHz dual-core).

      Compiling anything on PinePhone is also painful :D. But I suspect there is probably a lot more ARM packages available in distros and some app developers release ARM builds.

      Those energy efficiency comparisons are pretty interesting! x86 is also improving, so I’m curious if there will ever be x86 phones.