This computer is free or well it costs
money to buy one but the idea behind it is free. Free from patent restrictions,
licensing fees and all other manner of innovation crushing limitations. And it
actually works today. Look at it go. I
can run regular old desktop Linux with a regular old keyboard and mouse. I can
even browse the regular old internet. But can I play a regular old 3D
accelerated game? Yes,
even a few short years ago, the idea of risk 5 displacing or even competing with
established architectures like x86 or ARM seemed like a pipe dream. But it's
amazing just how much can be accomplished by a team of highly
motivated industry giants like Google, Tencent, and Qualcomm. But the question
is, why are they so motivated? What's wrong with x86 and ARM anyway? And why
is US Senator Marco Rubio over there in the corner?
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till the end of the video to learn more. This is the Milk 5 Pioneer and most of
its specs are pretty normal. It has 128
gigs of DDR4 memory, a 1 TBTE NVMe
solid-state drive, and a Radeon R5230 graphics card. We're going to have it
linked down below. What isn't normal is the 64 core Risk 5 processor. Risk 5 or
reduced instruction site computer 5 is an open standard instruction set. That
means that anyone can build a processor using it without any licensing fees or
even permission. The one in here was built by actually. Okay, that's a little
bit complicated. We're going to get to that later. First, let's fire it up and
see how she works. Oo.
You know, this isn't actually the first time that we've looked at a Risk 5
machine. That honor goes to the High-5 unleashed way back in 2018. But I think
that you're going to see that things have progressed quite a lot since then.
Let's see if we can get into the BIOS on this bad boy.
Spoiler, we can't. While it is expected to arrive sometime in the next month or
so, at this time there isn't a BIOS or UEFI in the traditional sense. [music]
You just press the button and then wait for it to boot, which takes a couple of
minutes. So, while we wait for that, let's talk a little bit about risk. As a
bit of a refresher from our previous videos on the topic, an instruction set
refers to the collection of the most basic functions that all other programs
are built upon. Things like adding, subtracting, writing to memory, or
reading from memory are all things you might find in a CPU's instruction set.
The idea of a processor with a minimal or reduced instruction set started in
the late 1970s with the experimental IBM
8001, and it stuck around pretty much since then in some form or another.
Power PC processors like those found in old Macs and ARM processors like those
found in new Macs, not to mention your cell phone, are both examples of risk
architectures. ARM even used to be called advanced risk machines. Though of
course, Risk 5 is not ARM, even if they
share some heritage. So don't expect to just throw macOS or Windows for ARM on
this thing. Thankfully, Linux exists, specifically Fedora 38 for our demo
today. Start by loading up Firefox then.
It's taking a while. Oh, wow. It's really slow. I feel like
that's a bit of a spoiler for later in the video, but uh
yikes. What other software have we got on here? Libra Office. Can we word
process? Yes.
buddy. Oh, she crashed. Give it another shot.
Okay, let's Hey,
what about spellch check, though? Yes. Pretty exciting. Time to try some free
open source games like Open Arena.
Come on, Tony. Come at me, bro.
Oh, jeez. Where'd you go? Whoa. Hey, Yumi. Oh, wait. I got a rocket launcher.
Oh, this is good. This is very good. No, I'm on my rocket launcher. What the heck
is this? She teleports. What the What
just happened? Come [laughter] on. How did that not
count? I don't have a single kill yet. You know what? I'm going to blame that
on the low frame rates, though. Those make sense given that the system is only
drawing about 90 watts from the wall right now. So, at least you can't fault
the efficiency. Remember, that number includes our GPU as well. But we've
glossed over a pretty important detail so far. The R in risk is for reduced.
Sure. Okay. But reduced from what? CISK
or complex instruction set. Computer processors like the x86 chips made by
Intel or AMD have much more robust
instruction sets. This allows them to complete complex operations with fewer
inputs. something that used to be used to reduce both development time and the
amount of disk space needed to store a program. Except the thing is modern
development tools are nothing like what they used to be. And your typical dev no
longer needs to worry about whether the CPU will perform one complex operation
or if it will achieve the same result with half a dozen simpler ones. And
Apple proved with the launch of their M series silicon that risks traditional
role as an efficient but low performance alternative could be left behind. This
new level of acceptance is a huge shot in the ARM, pun intended, for risk 5.
You see, porting to risk 5 from some
other risk ISA is much simpler than porting from x86, which has resulted in
a much larger software library than the last time that we checked in. But that's
not even the coolest part. The special sauce that made Apple's M1 launch so
successful was Rosetta 2, a translation layer that allowed x86 applications to
run on Apple's new ARM risk chips. And I
bet you probably see where I'm going with this. Box 64 is a super cool piece
of software that should allow us to run x86 64-bit applications on risk 5
without recompiling them up front. Let's go ahead and try and install Steam,
which isn't in our package manager. And we did find a Debian version of, but
this is a problem. Unfortunately, unless you're on Apple, Steam is only 32-bit
and Box 64 doesn't work with 32-bit
applications. So, maybe there's another
way for us to install Stardew Valley. The answer is obviously yes, because
Petite Seb got it running here. But, we ran into an issue with GG's Mojo
installer that we weren't able to get past, at least at the time of filming.
So, in a nutshell, it's kind of like the early days of the Proton translation
layer for gaming on Linux. There's clearly a lot of work to be done, but
the bones are there, and that is really, really exciting. A big question we
haven't touched on yet, though, is why not just use ARM? The truth is that the
risk 5 instruction set is pretty similar, but there's a big difference,
and that is that ARM is licensed. You see, even though Apple manufactures
their own M3 chips with partners like TSMC, and they've modified them quite a
bit compared to the ARM chips that are produced by other manufacturers like
Qualcomm or Marll, they still have to pay ARM some kind of licensing fee,
which is often a function of how many units they sell, which in Apple's case
is a lot. And while they won't move nearly as many of these things, there's
still a lot to be learned from poking at it a bit more because it's sort of half
PC and half development kit. Starting with the front IO, this type-C port, for
example, doubles as a debug console connector. Then there's the fact that it
runs quad channel memory. That's something I've not seen on the desktop
in quite some time. There's two PCIe 16X
slots that seem to operate at Gen 4 speeds. Though it should be noted that
one of them is only a by8 connection and then we've also got an M.2 and another
M.2 meaning there's a fair bit of PCIe on this thing. The SATA ports are weird.
There's five of them which is an odd number [music] literally and
figuratively. And the fact that they've all got these little covers on them,
right? Like what is up with that? According to Milk 5, these are dust
covers. And that's not the only odd thing that we asked them about. There's
an MCU on here which is an ARM chip. And
according to Milk 5, they have no intention of replacing it with a Risk 5
equivalent in the near future. And the same can be said about the PCIe
controller in the top left of the board that is also an ARM chip and actively
cooled by a super annoying little fan. If you guys heard that earlier in the
video, I unplugged it. That's why it hasn't been making noise anymore.
[snorts] Oh wow, this is funky. It only uses a 24 pin power connector. No
additional four pin or 8 pin or anything for the CPU. That's pretty cool. These
banks of pins along the bottom are apparently for USB debugging, UART, and
JTAG connections. And then the cooler is a really interesting one. You can see
here, this has been modified to fit an Intel LGA1 1150 cooler with a bracket
that's included. So, theoretically, you could use any 1150 cooler you wanted,
but that's not what we're interested in. We want to take a look at what exactly
it's cooling. It turns out it's a Sophon
SG2042 made by Sofco, a subsidiary of
Bitmain. Now, Bitmain's major product up until this point has been the Ant Miner,
a crypto mining machine that accounts for over 70% of all the processing power
on the Bitcoin blockchain, but Sofco didn't design the actual cores that
they're using. The C920 core comes from
Tad Semiconductor Limited, the chip division of Alibaba, the owner of
AliExpress, not to mention a vast number of other companies. This chip then could
be described as a collaboration between arguably the most powerful company in
crypto and arguably the most powerful company in China. It's not exactly high
performance at the moment, but it does work. And if you think this has some
folks scared, you are right. SCI5, maker
of the original Risk 5 computer, has laid off roughly 20% of their workforce
recently. Now, they claim that this is a restructuring, and it likely is, but
there could be more to this story. After the United States government announced
the ban on exporting RTX490s to China,
several senators wanted to take it a step further with Marco Rubio, oh,
that's why we [music] had him in the background, quoted as saying, "Communist China is developing open-
source chip architecture to dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry."
[music] He's referring to risk five here. And he's not entirely wrong. Even though
[music] in typical politician fashion, his solution is more of a self-own than
a clever maneuver. The idea of banning US companies from working on risk 5 with
Chinese companies. Kind of makes sense on the surface. I mean, why export your
technological innovation to a foreign adversary? But in practice, it's not
going to hurt China nearly as much as it's going to hurt US companies like
Sci-Fi as we hurdle towards a risk five future. And I cannot overstate the pace
at which this is happening. During the writing of this video, Sci-Fi and SoftGo
announced two new desktop chips that are slated for release in 2024. This could
be a big moment for Sci-Fi's continued growth, particularly in the widescale
adoption sense. But Sofco, they've already got competing products on the
market. Of [music] course, you might be wondering at this point with our
mentions of Steam and Proton. What does all of this mean for gamers for now?
Probably not much. Not only will you not be buying one of these and throwing the
latest GPU hotness into it, you won't even be throwing last gen GPU hotness
into it. We tried an AMD 6000 series card and uh no bueno. No drivers. But
that doesn't mean that you'll be limited to the best that Milk 5 certifies the
system for, which is the RX 550. We found that it would work with any 500
series card as long as you have a beefy enough power supply and went with an
RX580 to see how things would go. Just uh note
though that you might need an upgraded power supply in order to get this working cuz normally the system ships
with a 350 W power supply. But with that
said, with how little power draw we had before, maybe that would work fine anyway. I don't know.
Oh, sick. Zenotic is working. Wait a
minute. Am I in an actual game? Oh, shoot. This is Oh, my mouse is only
sporadically working. Are these bots or what? I can't I have no idea what's
happening here. I believe those are bots. Okay, good. Now I have a chance. Let's
go. Uh, where's my FPS? Oh, there it is
down in the bottom court. Hey, that's way better. And these are better
graphics than we had last time. Hey, fragged airhead. Let's go.
There's no way any human could be beaten by me right now. The best gaming
computer ever? Certainly not. My mouse just stopped working. But if things
continue to improve, this could be a viable option
very soon. The biggest organization likely scared of risk 5 is obviously
ARM. But the story goes a bit deeper than most people realize. ARM is owned
by SoftBank. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Sun
was one of Alibaba's first investors and until this past year, SoftBank owned up
to 24% of Alibaba. Jack Ma, co-founder
of Alibaba, sat on the board of directors for SoftBank for 13 years
starting in 2007. These two companies then were more than just close. [music]
But that has changed drastically in the past 2 or 3 years when Jack Ma said some
things then disappeared until he didn't. But then did he? [music] And regardless
of all of that, under the new jackless leadership of Eddie Woo and Josai,
Alibaba's various entities seem to have doubled down on producing their own
chips separate from ARM in line with the
Chinese government's made in China 2025 campaign. And Risk 5 is a key part of
that strategy, allowing the Chinese government to be free of any foreign
interference in their tech development, at least at some point. Based on the
benchmarks, there is um still a lot of work to be done.
All right, so it's been a few days and I think I've got something really exciting
going. Wait, we already did the MIL 5? Yes, but I'm I I went back and did it
better. Yeah, it's running. [laughter] I I am the first person on Earth to get
Euro Truck Simulator working on a Risk 5 CPU.
I mean, [laughter]
no, you know what? Yeah, let's go.
[laughter] Okay, shut up. Really? We're going to be standing here for a
minute. It's slow, but it actually does like load and you can almost drive a
truck. Good. Holy.
All right, I did crash the truck in the last game. So, that he may have done.
Let's see if I can crash the game. It's running at about 4 FPS, which means the
physics and inputs are a little funky. But are you guys seeing this? Running
poorly is a big step toward running
well. That's why I passed gym class. Okay. What happens if you hit a gas
station? How is the destructibility of the environments?
Not so good. [laughter] The growth of Risk 5 then is all but set
in stone at least for the next few years. Qualcomm and Google have
announced that their next line of wearables will use Risk 5. Manufacturer
Ventana claims that their upcoming Veyron V2 CPU is the most powerful Risk
5 processor ever and they intend to roll it out to data center. Imagination
Technologies is beginning to roll out their new line of Risk 5 GPUs that can
do DirectX11. So, these are still early days, but it is a heck of a start. If
you remember back to 2012 with the first release of Windows RT for ARM, it was
notoriously fairly crap. But then Apple released the
M1 in 2020 and people were shocked at how competent it could be [music] at
such a low power level. Well, if you ask me, Risk 5 is a lot closer than you
would think to its M1 moment. With a solid backer deciding they are done
paying Intel ARM for licensing fees, it could be your next desktop or laptop
processor virtually overnight. All it takes is one company [music] like a
Google, a Huawei or an Apple that implements it into their ecosystem and
boom, you've got a risk 5 processor right there beside you. Just like right
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with ODU. If you guys enjoyed this video, check out our first look at Risk
5 and a little history lesson from 2018. [music]