DC-ROMA Laptop II packs an octa-core RISC-V processor, 16GB of RAM and Ubuntu Linux
  • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.caEnglish
    33·
    7 months ago

    I don’t think Steam and Wine works on RISC-V? Especially if Wine uses native x86 instructions.

    But maybe in the future games will be recompiled for RISC-V, wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being a checkbox on Godot.

    • lengauEnglish
      9·
      7 months ago

      Steam for Linux only has x86 builds right now and wine only translates system calls, so by default they won’t work.

      There are ways to get them to work though, but they mostly involve emulating x86. Given the performance of the current state of the art in RISC-V, that won’t exactly go well right now.

      That said, that’s not what this machine is for at all. As a software developer working on developer tools for Linux, this is particularly interesting to me as a way to improve the Linux RISC-V ecosystem while dogfooding my own stuff.

  • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
    16·
    7 months ago

    In terms of specifications all I can find is that this has a 2.0GHz 8-core RV64 processor with Vector. That’s not a lot of info.

    Does anybody know anything more about it? Performance level, battery life, etc. I expect this is really a phone or SBC level processor, so it should sip power, right?

    • Synapse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      7 months ago

      Do not expect this thing to be a daily driver. It’s aimed at developers who need a Risc-V testing platform. Very few Software will run on it unless you can spend hours making it compile for Risk-V and lets not talk about drivers. Also it will likely cost over $1000.

      I am exited for the future of Risc-V in the consumer space, but we aren’t there yet.

      • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        I think those will have to have fairly good IPC, otherwise they won’t be able to keep the array processors fed with work.

        Guess we’ll see.

          • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            Disagree. You quite often have a fair degree of scaler code in between portions which are embarrassingly parallel. If you don’t have a decent scaler core you are destined to be become bottlenecked on them. It’s not that different to a CPU / GPU pairing. If one is under powered, it determines the speed of the overall system.

            If you look at what a company like Tenstorrent is doing, they are designing high performance Risc-V cores as a side aspect of their main goal of doing array processors. The reason is because they couldn’t find scaler cores on the market with enough performance to not bottleneck the system.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    14·
    7 months ago

    If they do something like a NUC form factor, I might buy it. I think it would make a decent NAS, but not a great laptop/desktop due to missing software. If it has solid USB-C, I can get a HDD enclosure and be good to go with RISC-V.