You don’t need a license to build and sell a RISC-V chip. I believe that is its primary advantage over ARM. Anything more is gravy :)
fidotron · 3h ago
It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole. Your operating system is barely concerned about the instruction set, and much more concerned about the buses and so on that are available, and how to drive them.
You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
> You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
You get standardization on servers because of UEFI and ACPI. There are some ARM boards out there with UEFI, but for whatever reason it hasn't generally caught on in the ARM world like it has for x86.
bigstrat2003 · 3h ago
> It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole.
Many people are only casually interested in something, so they learn less quickly. Or they are just learning for the first time. It's not actually particularly incredible that there are people who don't know this.
esbranson · 46m ago
Vendors don't need to ship their own images at all. Just let users install stock Debian, then provide a thin vendor package set (kernel, u-boot, DTBs, firmware) tied together by a meta-package. With apt pinning, upgrades become normal Debian transactions, security updates track Debian, and the vendor layer shrinks to a small LTS kernel delta plus boot bits.
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ChuckMcM · 3h ago
The author appears to be nostalgic for the wintel monopoly that made it possible to write software for one system standard "PC" and have it run on dozens of different manufacturer's hardware. The people who use ARM chips typically write their own code because they aren't building general purpose computers, they are building an appliance of some sort, whether its a phone or an access point or a disk controller.
freedomben · 3h ago
I don't disagree at all with you, but it does pain me a little bit to see a phone referred to as an appliance. Phones nowadays are plenty capable general purpose computers if they aren't intentionally handicapped by the manufacturers, and the manufacturers certainly do think of them as appliances and treat them as such, but I wish that collectively we would reject that and insist on not artificially hobbling their capabilities
ChuckMcM · 1h ago
I know it feels like a semantic quibble. Consider that you can boot and run Linux on the processor that powers a Seagate hard drive. You can even run a c compiler and develop new code on it. But when you pull one from its protective wrapping after you bought it from a distributor, it isn't a "computer", it's a storage device (dedicated function, aka an appliance for storing data), that you can plug into a general purpose computer, or into a smart television, or into a DVR, Etc.
Similarly, for a long time, the CPU in my washing machine (a Z80) was the same processor that my first computer with disk drives had (a Cromemco System 3, aka a "business computer" which ran CP/M) but it was intentionally hobbled to just run the display, run some timed processes, and read various sensors.
Building "purpose built systems" that happen to have a computer processor inside of them because it is cheaper or more efficient to implement their functions in code, are what pretty much everyone considers "appliances." Sometimes obviously so, as in washing machines, and sometimes not so obviously when you can buy "apps", or "personality modules", or "game cartridges" for them to make them do something useful given the constraints of the fixed I/O they have.
But if you have a computer system that is intentionally hobbled to a fixed set of things, then for me, it's an appliance and certainly not a general purpose computer.
murphyslaw · 3h ago
The author is specifically talking about Raspberry Pi upstreaming changes. Isn't that about as close as you will get to a general purpose SoC?
fidotron · 3h ago
Right, and to emphasise the point there are x86 machines which are not architecturally PCs, such as the original XBox and Playstations 4 and 5.
kelnos · 3h ago
> Raspberry Pi OS is only based on Debian bookworm (released in 2023) and very explicitly does not support a key Debian feature: you can’t upgrade from one Raspberry Pi OS release to the next, so it’s a complete reinstall every 2 years instead of just an upgrade.
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.
You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
You get standardization on servers because of UEFI and ACPI. There are some ARM boards out there with UEFI, but for whatever reason it hasn't generally caught on in the ARM world like it has for x86.
Many people are only casually interested in something, so they learn less quickly. Or they are just learning for the first time. It's not actually particularly incredible that there are people who don't know this.
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Similarly, for a long time, the CPU in my washing machine (a Z80) was the same processor that my first computer with disk drives had (a Cromemco System 3, aka a "business computer" which ran CP/M) but it was intentionally hobbled to just run the display, run some timed processes, and read various sensors.
Building "purpose built systems" that happen to have a computer processor inside of them because it is cheaper or more efficient to implement their functions in code, are what pretty much everyone considers "appliances." Sometimes obviously so, as in washing machines, and sometimes not so obviously when you can buy "apps", or "personality modules", or "game cartridges" for them to make them do something useful given the constraints of the fixed I/O they have.
But if you have a computer system that is intentionally hobbled to a fixed set of things, then for me, it's an appliance and certainly not a general purpose computer.
What? I've upgraded my RPis in-place every single time there's a new OS release. They don't support upgrading that way, perhaps, but I've never had a problem.
And even for official Debian releases, they recommend you do a full backup, because it might not work.