[TUHS] PG3 or Gen3.0?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Friday, May 8th, 2026 at 10:48, Adam Thornton via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Generally, it's not that ARM is any faster than x86_64--but it can take
> much less energy to give you the same amount of computation.

With the advent of widespread mobile devices, this was crucial.  Necessity drove ARMs meteoric rise, and now priorities seem to be shifting once again, this time surrounding supply chains and fab redundancy, stuff like that.  My hunch is we're going to start seeing more interest in royalty-free designs like RISC-V and even moreso if there are such designs over in the realm of solid state memory.  No sociopolitical commentary but the TSMC situation is certainly on the mind.  Couple this with the hiring spree companies like Apple and nVidia had in the RISC-V realm several years ago and I suspect we'll start seeing the baby steps towards another tectonic shift possibly in the next decade.

Granted this is now getting quite far afield from the original subject.  To bring it back around, the modern pedagogical V6 port xv6 runs on RISC-V now, so that means there is also hope for bootstrapping other historic UNIX systems (like PG3) on RISC-V.  Given the nature of RISC-V as purely an ISA standard, not an implementation, this implies that UNIX's life has now been extended theoretically indefinitely, RISC-V is supposed to have future proofing baked-into the ISA design, offering an appealing interface to compute that isn't as likely to evaporate in a decade or two.

But that's basicslly what they said about System/360 and VAX was it not?  I guess time will tell if RISC-V really significantly moves the needle in the modern UNIX-like playfield.

- Matt G.