Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
I thought that microprocessor production and design was fraught with risk of infringing on other designers&#x27; patents (even for original ISAs).  I can see that industry heavyweights have arrived to support RISC-V, so hopefully that comes with a team of professors&#x2F;lawyers that could defend them.  But, why now?  Why couldn&#x27;t this have happened sooner?  Didn&#x27;t Sun try to create an open SPARC processor design?  What does RISC-V have that it didn&#x27;t?<p>Is the intent for RISC-V to compete with modern high-end CPU designs, or do we just want to have royalty-free microprocessors for our embedded devices?<p>You might be surprised (at least I was) to learn that peripherals like hard drives and PCI-add-in cards usually have their own CPU executing their own software.  Those processors are often MIPS&#x2F;ARM&#x2F;etc based and the manufacturer has to shell out to someone to be able to use that, even if they designed the processor themselves.  I can see how this particular market is ripe for something like RISC-V.  But does anyone expect RISC-V to really go head-to-head with Xeon, Opteron, ThunderX, Centriq?<p>I sound incredulous because this seems surprising to me, but I have no evidence to suggest whether it&#x27;s as unlikely as I think.  I&#x27;ve certainly seen open source software designs far superior to closed source ones, so maybe hardware design is no different?