All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
Thanks for pointing that out, I must have skipped over the system76 link. You're right that besides Apple, nVidia and Ampere also make viable ARM workstation chips.
You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what
> You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit.
I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
The thing is, I have been in this business for 38 years now, and people have been telling me this for at least 3 or 4 years now. Including face-to-face from industry chip makers.
Really, honestly, right now, next month, OK, next quarter, but definitely by next year, really, the next generation is coming and it will bring the speed. The performance is coming, really soon.
And in fact, it's dire. It's crap.
Apple has a huge lead with its Arm chips and although most of the team that made that happen went off to other companies years ago now, nobody else has caught up. Qualcomm isn't there, but it's closer than anyone else. Amazon's server chips look promising but they're huge multicore things, not desktop/single-user devices at all, and they're very expensive in standalone desktops like from System 76.
Nobody so far can equal what Arm can do in skilled hands, and I bought my first desktop Arm computer in 1989. I've known that the potential was there for over a third of a century because I was there at the start.
... and asked him, telling him that I was the Linux reporter from The Register. He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
That was November 2023.
It didn't happen.
At the following Ubuntu Summit, I spoke to Nirav Patel right after he did this demo:
«
It runs, it works, and even high-definition video playback is smooth, but this is not a powerhouse CPU. The machine we tried was sluggish and not very responsive. Even playing a single YouTube video, CPU utilization in the System Monitor was pretty high, and it was working hard when we tried moving the video window around. Minimizing it did reduce the CPU burden, though. Aside from video decoding, the machine felt less responsive than our old Raspberry Pi 3, to pick a more familiar example. In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance.
»
We are another year on, and I just recently returned from the following Ubuntu Summit. I am still waiting.
A RVA20 compliant chip, released in 2023. I have one of these (VisionFive 2, received February 2023) with a couple hard disks and ZFS, serving as home NAS. Between RPi 3 and RPi 4 in CPU speed, similar I/O as RPi 4.
Obviously not a speed demon, but it was the very first mass-produced RISC-V SoC.
>He swore blind that I'd be blown away by the kit that SiFive would release the next year.
Probably the Intel thing that never actually happened, despite there been test chips which is what your acquaintance likely was able to play with.
SiFive released something else instead, earlier this year, as stopgap. Based on their P550 microarchitecture, it is dramatically faster than JH7110, but of no particular interest to anybody not directly involved in RISC-V, as it lacks vector and thus isn't RVA23 compliant.
In 2026, it'll be 2023+3, and many usefully fast RVA23 core IPs (Above Zen1 performance) are expected to finally show up in development boards, although only the one from Tenstorrent has had a concrete announcement so far.
There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them).
NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them).
The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.
