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.

He said: “Even when you do hardware design more openly, 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 have no idea how the hardware works,” he said.

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

“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.”

Even if RISC-V development is still expected to make many mistakes, it will be much easier to develop the hardware now.

Linus said: “It took a few decades to get to the point where Arm and x86 are competing on fairly equal ground because there was all this software that was fairly PC-centric, and that has passed. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to come in.”