RISC-V on the Verge of Broad Adoption
Hah!<p>EEtimes 2002 "Infiniband on the Verge of Broad Adoption" whoops :-)<p>But more seriously, I think having a license free CPU core with software support is a huge win, it will enable people like TSMC and GF to make 'jelly bean' CPUs that  can be low cost and high volume. But they won't be that much different than the low end ARM cpus which are basically the cost of packaging these days anyway.<p>The market forces in a 14nm (last year's process node) world are pretty interesting. 90% of the cost is the dicing, testing, and packaging the parts.<p>So the other market force is the Western Digitals of the world who will make RISC-V embedded SOCs with exactly the right set of peripherals they need to make a billion disk drive motor controllers. But most people won't see those chips in the marketplace. And there probably won't be a 'design to order' chip house that will make small volumes of these things.<p>Imagine you are a Microchip or a ST Micro, what does RISC-V do for you? It lets you avoid the few cents you pay for the ARM license per chip, does it let you differentiate any more? Look how well that worked out for the AtMega16 for Atmel.<p>So that is the embedded market, kind of a wash.<p>But what about "bigger" systems? Laptops or desktops or servers? Do the pareto analysis on those systems, compare an ARM SoC to a RISC-V one. The costs are in memory, support chips, PCBs, tooling etc. Not the CPU license.<p>Will it let people build chips for phones like Apple does with their own GPUs and microarchitecture? Sure, and at less cost, but what then does that give the average consumer? A cheaper phone with market features? Ok that's a win but they won't care it is RISC-V versus ARM v8 or what not.<p>Bottom line is that I think it is great to have the ability to create computers that are not beholden to a certain vendor but I don't see the vector for getting them into general distribution where consumers actually benefit from the change.