Finding computer equipment that respects user freedom and owner control can feel a lot like squeezing water out from stone. You may be one of a few of us who have tepidly followed the developments surrounding RISC-V since its inception last decade. And it looks like the fruits of those efforts are finally coming to bear.
There has been a trend with rights holders of older architectures responding to the emergence of RISC-V by opening up their licensing in hopes of not being overtaken. But it is too little too late. We need only look at what happened with MIPS who open sourced their long time proprietary architecture and only a few years later are now refocusing on RISC-V. Debian have even decided to drop the MIPS architecture from the upcoming Trixie release and free up some space for the new kid on the block.
On the POWER side of things, in addition to being late to the open licensing party, the OpenPOWER effort also suffers from sabotage by its very founders when IBM soiled their architecture with proprietary memory interface firmware. The message this sends is that they dont take the OpenPOWER initiative seriously at all. This has left what few vendors who were actually producing POWER products within reach of average people to scrounge for their own solutions. Developers have been giving up their OpenPOWER workstations while the Raptor Computing Systems TXitter and forums have been wheeled over to hospice care, if activity is any indicator.
Meanwhile, there’s RISC-V which seems to be following one trajectory: UP.
Even when I’m not actively seeking out information on it, there always seems to be some new RISC-V development milestones cropping up [1][2][3]. Team RISC-V enjoys a plurality of vendors producing boards and frequent attention from governments [1][2][3], acedemia and the wider industry. The Debian project’s package stats inform that POWER and RISC-V are currently neck and neck for build coverage, and that’s with POWER getting a two decade head start!
I maintain hope that the world of OpenPOWER will produce yet to be seen libre computing solutions, but my hopes soon return to Earth when we consider that the best OpenPOWER has to offer as of today are expensive (the prices have even gone up since launch!), large[er than I would like] form factor, 8+ years old systems whose components are being delisted as EOL, while there is not a single peep for over a year from the one and only design house who had even been retailing anything.
Meanwhile RISC-V seems to be finding its way into everything lately.
If every major player has a RISC-V program underway, then they are already reacting.
So I find that I will probably need to keep a few different irons in the fire. For those averse to reading, allow me to summerize the situation thusly:
| The inertia behind OpenPOWER right now | The inertia behind RISC-V in contrast |
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