nickwitha_k (he/him)

A slight modification as I have new information: If you can justify it, the Xreal One might be worthwhile as they have added an ASIC to do away when the buggy software and dongle nonsense. Still not super open-source friendly (they’re not actively hostile either) but that seems to solve my biggest issue with the experience. They seem to have better quality optics as well.

I may end up getting a pair of those to replace my Nreal Airs that are held together with tape and CA glue (I’m unfortunately hard on my electronics).

The velocity that RISC-V development is seeing is remarkable. The first commercial ARM processor (ARM1) started design in 1983 and was released in 1985. The first Linux-capable ARM processor was the ARM2, released in 1986. The first 64-bit variant was Armv8-A, released in 2011, with Armv9.6-A in 2024.

RISC-V was first released in 2014 and the stable privileged and unprivileged ISAs were released 2021 and 2019 (including the first stable rv64I), respectively. The first Linux-capable RISC-V processor released was the SiFive Freedom U540, which came out in 2018. The current rv64I variant of RISC-V is at 2.1, released in 2022.

I’m optimistic that RISC-V can and will compete, given its compressed development timeframe and mass adoption in MCUs and coprocessors. The big hurdles really are getting rid of the hardware implementation bugs (ex. failure to correctly implement IEEE754 floats in THead C906 and C910 CPUs), and getting software support and optimizations.

There are several HPC companies iterating towards commercial datacenter deployment, of special note being Tenstorrent, which both has an interesting, novel architecture and Jim Keller (know for AMD K8, AMD64, and Apple M-series) as CTO. They may be able to displace NVIDIA a bit in the DC AI/ML space, which could help to force GPU prices to get more reasonable, which would be nice.

Overall, yeah, rv64 has a good deal of catching up to do but, with the ISA not requiring special, exorbitant licensing, hardware development is moving much faster that expected and may be competitive with ARM in more spaces soon, if they don’t succeed in using governments as an anti-competitive bludgeon.

Well, no, you’re not going to be etching CPUs into silicon wafers in your basement

Actually: https://docs.hackerfab.org/hacker-fab-space

No problem! My “dream” HMD would be birdbath optics with ~2k displays for each eye and probably some simple hardware upscaling. The glasses being “dumb” is a real perk. Doubling the pixels/° would make the experience that much better.

Sad. I was rooting for their weird-looking trucks, though they looked more and more like vapor-ware.

Previously, I’d have recommended Xreal Air but the company is allergic to open-source and doesn’t have a great track record of supporting their own software. At the moment, Viture seems a better bet, from those that I’m aware of. For screen replacement, the high pixels-per-degree of birdbath optics, like both use, are extremely advantageous and cause much less eye strain. And that’s while being far cheaper than waveguides or pancake optics.

That actually is something that I’ve been contemplating doing. I never use the built-in display - HMD glasses are just much nicer.