I'm planning to switch to RISC-V by 2030, and since this is new to me (I’m an old AMD64 (and i386) veteran), I wanted to ask what your thoughts and predictions are regarding performance, stability, and usability as a creator of all kinds of content, whether it’s music, movies, 3D, or watching cat videos on YouTube. I’m also planning to buy a new, fresh computer, maybe a laptop from around 2027/2028. Is that a good idea, or am I biting off more than I can chew? To sum up, I’m asking for your opinions, advice, warnings, and thoughts. Feel free to write not only answers to my questions but anything you consider important in the context of the RISC-V and Linux marriage in the near future
The common issues with RISC-V laptops, or rather any laptops made with SoCs that weren't designed to be laptop-first, include things like sleep not putting the system in a low enough power state (battery will run out if you leave it folded without turning it off), underwhelming GPU, higher power draw when idle, and lower peak performance for intermittent load. If none of those are a dealbreaker, the newest DeepComputing Framework board (on K3) can arguably be considered a viable daily driver RISC-V laptop option, though I wouldn't want to use it as one.
Nvidia, AMD, and Intel are the big names for GPUs and they all have products that integrate a GPU into the same SoC as the CPU, but none of them would be likely to license out their GPU IP to other SoC vendors in modern times. Same goes for the in-house GPU designs for Apple/Qualcomm/Samsung. ARM does license out its Mali GPU IP, and that's often the go-to option for SoC vendors that don't have their own in-house GPU, but RISC-V systems can't use that. So RISC-V systems' GPU options effectively amount to either: