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RISC-V Is Now An Official Debian Architecture
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Why is RISC-V significant? I'm completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Because it's an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, ...) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
And Apple will get to do a fourth architecture migration
I thought their old PowerPc architecture was risc
Indeed it was. Different RISC ISA though.
This is for my own clarification, and anyone else that is confused by the terminology here.
In the mid- or late 1990s, I took a processor design class, and RISC was "Reduced Instruction Set Computer", a generic term for the direction processors were going at the time - even though they had a reduced set of instructions, and therefore had to process more instructions, they could run faster overall because the simplification meant they processed each individual instruction that much more quickly. (IIRC the class textbook was written by the people who had designed the MIPS processor.)
It was my understanding that the speed limitations in the traditional "complex" (CISC) processors were then overcome, so that processor design philosophy continues as well (in particular, x86 architecture is still CISC).
Now, I'm looking this up on Wikipedia: Okay, RISC-V is a set of instructions for a processor, and there are multiple open-source processors that implement RISC-V.
This announcement is that Debian now will theoretically run on those processors. Cool!
*fifth
I'm not really counting the 6502, since I don't think Apple ever bothered with emulation or backwards compatibility for it once they moved to 68000.