Linus Torvalds says RISC-V will make the same mistakes as Arm and x86

There's a vast difference between hardware and software developers, which opens up pitfalls for those trying to coordinate the two teams. Arm and x86 researchers encountered it years ago -- and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, fears RISC-V development may fall into the same chasm again.

“Even when you do hardware design in a more open manner, hardware people are different enough from software people [that] there’s a fairly big gulf between the Verilog and even the kernel, much less higher up the stack where you are working in what [is] so far away from the hardware that you really have no idea how the hardware works,” he said (video embedded below).

“So, it’s really hard to kind of work across this very wide gulf of things and I suspect the hardware designers, some of them have some overlap, but they will learn by doing mistakes — all the same mistakes that have been done before.”

RISC-V is an open-standard ISA for processors that is slowly gaining traction, especially in China, where some tech companies are using it to bypass America’s sanctions on the country. Companies like DeepComputing and Framework have started developing, building, and selling consumer laptops powered by these new processors.

But even though RISC-V is slowly being built up, it’s still not at the performance level that it could compete against current generation x86 and Arm processors. It would still take several years or decades of development to play AAA games on a RISC-V chip. But even though Arm, which also uses a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, has already undergone intensive development, Linus fears RISC-V will still make the same mistakes.

“They’ll have all the same issues we have on the Arm side and that x86 had before them,” he says. “It will take a few generations for them to say, ‘Oh, we didn’t think about that,’ because they have new people involved.”

But even if RISC-V development is still expected to make many mistakes, he also said it will be much easier to develop the hardware now. Linus says, “It took a few decades to really get to the point where Arm and x86 are competing on fairly equal ground because there was al this software that was fairly PC-centric and that has passed. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to then come in.”