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> You do realize that Linux got basic SMP support 3 years after NT?

Linux started about three years after NT did. And NT could only support 64 processors for a long time when Linux could support thousands.

> It still does not have reliable sleep-wake.

Neither does NT really. Both depend on ACPI for the systems you're talking about, and it's the platform interface that's ultimately fucked.

> And it only added native async file i/o in 2019, while NT has had it on the same hardware since 1993

And has beaten NT on IO throughput for decades, and even now windows ships with a linux kernel integration because running Linux on a hypervisor is far batter for filesystem ops than running those on NT.

And the new async I/O API was so good that NT adopted it wholesale and didn't even bother changing the name. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/ioringap...

> So.. i'll expect an in-order core with an IPC south of 0.5 that cannot exit low power sleep 30% of the time in a decade or so.

There are already open source OoO RISC-V cores.

But the point originally isn't to be some Linux fan boy (I've written a decent amount of NT kernel code, and have a lot of respect for NT and the things it did right). It's to point out how the upcoming changes inherent to how chips are made and the latencies between gate count targets will better support open collaboration. And once that's supported properly, open source has a tendency to kind of snowball.

by dmitrygr1 days ago|

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We shall see :) When my iPhone or laptop is no longer running aarch64, i'll happily admit i had been wrong

by brucehoult1 days ago|

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History is much easier than prediction.

I'm with Jim Keller when he says that in time the fastest CPUs will be RISC-V ones.

by api18 hours ago|

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If China leapfrogs EUV, this could happen.

by dismalaf17 hours ago|

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What does this have to do with anything? You do know that a bunch of American corporations are shipping RISC-V cores, right? Including Jim Keller's current company, Tenstorrent.

by monocasa1 days ago|

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I mean, Apple is different from pretty much every other manufacturer here. They collborated in the design of aarch64, and a rumored to own a lot of the base IP themselves which they've cross licensed with ARM. It's very close to AMD:Intel::Apple:ARM when it comes to aarch64. That heavily changes the licensing costs. My point isn't that RISC-V is markedly better, but instead that it's equivalent from a perf achievable from in the same nexus of PPA and NRE effort. So there's no reason for Apple to take the pain of a leap with no real gain, but NRE losses.

I would expect to see RISC-V Android phones (probably initially out of China, despite ARM China) within the next few years. They've been busy bees since RVA23 was ratified with a bunch of Chinese companies making changes to optimize AOSP for RVA23. I've also heard on the grapevine that NT already has a RISC-V port internally, but take that with whatever grain of salt you feel like. But Microsoft has already been contributing to the RISC-V specs (they contributed to Ztso for instance).

by brucehoult1 days ago|

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There is zero chance that Apple doesn't have MacOS and iOS running on RISC-V in the lab.

They did that with x86 and Arm half a decade before any announcement about a switch, not to mention a number of other ISAs that didn't make it to shipping (e.g. M88k) and probably ones that word has never leaked about. IA64, anyone?

They're too large and rich and risk-averse to *not* do it.

by dmitrygr14 hours ago|

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I do wonder, which of the two of us actually worked for years in Apple’s kernel team? :)

by brucehoult4 hours ago|

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Not me for sure. I have no idea about you. Of household name companies I've only worked at Mozilla and Samsung R&D. And SiFive if you count people in threads such as this.

I could of course be wrong but I think the publicly known history sets the pattern pretty reliably for the speculation.