Building a RISC-V PC

While it's clear that the most significant opportunities for RISC-V will be in democratising custom silicon for accelerating specific tasks and enabling new applications - and it's already driving a renaissance in novel computer architectures, for e.g. IoT and edge processing - one question that people cannot help but ask is, so when can I have a RISC-V PC? The answer to which is, right now. The result is a RISC-V powered system that can be used as a desktop computer and thanks to the efforts of Atish Patra at Western Digital, installing Fedora Linux is a breeze. This is obviously not exactly commodity hardware, but it does show that the ingredients are there and the combination provides a powerful development platform for anyone who might want to prototype a RISC-V PC - or indeed a vast array of other applications which stand to benefit from the open ISA. This has me very excited. Over the last few decades, virtually all competitors to x86 slowly died out - SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, etc. - which turned desktop computing hardware into a rather boring affair. Recently we've been seeing more and more ARM desktop boards, and now it seems RISC-V is starting to dabble in this area too. Great news.