I keep checking in on Tenstorrent every few months thinking Keller is going to rock our world... losing hope.
At this point the most likely place for truly competitive RISC-V to appear is China.
I keep checking in on Tenstorrent every few months thinking Keller is going to rock our world... losing hope.
At this point the most likely place for truly competitive RISC-V to appear is China.
Tenstorrent is supposedly taping out 8-wide Ascalon processors as we speak, with devboards projected to be available in Q2/Q3 this year.
BTW. Keller is also on the board of AheadComputing — founded by former Intel engineers behind the fabled "Royal Core".
I can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.
That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.
I don't know what bubble you are living in, but the i5-9600K is many steps up beyond "SBC class".
The Raspberry Pi 5 results on Geekbench 6 are all over the place. A score between 500 to 900 in single core and a 2000 multi core score.
Radxa 4 is an SBC based around the N100 and it basically gets the same or slightly higher performance as the Raspberry Pi 5.
Meanwhile the i5-9600K gets a score of 1677 in single core, which is 83% of the performance of the entire Raspberry Pi 5 and gets a score of 6199 when using multiple cores, that's 3x the performance.
I'd call this at least "Laptop class" and you even admitted yourself back in 2025 that you're using a processor on that level.
"I don't know what bubble you are living in"
My bubble includes a number of SBCs and embedded boards from Advantech, frequently using Ryzen embedded (V1000 class) CPUs.
SBC is too vague I suppose. Past the Raspberry Pi form factor SBC class, there are many* SBC vendors with Core i5-1340P and similar CPUs today. That's a 2023 device, and just past a 2018 i5-9600K, aligning well with what I claimed.
In 2025+, such a CPU is not a desktop class device, and is sufficient only in low cost laptops (but in much lower power form.) A MacBook Neo A18, for example, is considerably better than a i5-9600K.
It would be great if Tentorrent actually yields such a product, and if, based on later performance projections that appeared in late 2025, Ascalon is actually faster, but, as I said, the world will not change much. RISC-V developers will appreciate compiling like it's 2019, but that's as far as it will go.
* LattePanda Sigma, ASROCK NUC, DFROBOT, Premio and many NAS and industrial devices.
>Ascalon tape out
Supposedly happened earlier this year. Tenstorrent says devboards in Q3.
Now we just wait.
> At this point the most likely place for fast RISC-V to appear is China.
Or we just adopt Loongson.
TBH I still don't really get how it's different from MIPS. As far as I can tell... Loongson seems to be really just MIPS, while LoongArch is MIPS with some extra instructions.
They did get rid of the delay slots and some other MIPS oddities
LoongArch is, on a first approximation, an almost RISC-V user space instruction set together with MIPS-like privileged instructions and registers.
Wait, this is a modern-ish ISA with a software-managed TLB, I didn’t realize that! The manual seems a bit unhappy about that part though:
> In the current version of this architecture specification, TLB refill and consistent maintenance between TLB and page tables are still [sic] all led by software.
https://loongson.github.io/LoongArch-Documentation/LoongArch...
I think they have already added hardware page table walks.
https://lwn.net/Articles/932048/
But legally distinct! I guess calling it Ｍ○ＰＳ was not enough for plausible deniability.
ISAs shouldn't be patentable in the first place.
(purely on vibes) loongson feels to me like an intermediate step/backup strategy rather than a longterm target (though they'll probably power govt equipment for decades of legacy either way :p)