I see an interest in the deeply embedded space. ARM has a reputation of being cheap, and it certainly is compared to Intel. But when you go to the low end (mass

I see an interest in the deeply embedded space. ARM has a reputation of being cheap, and it certainly is compared to Intel. But when you go to the low end (mass volume basic IoT), it's not cheap anymore. And their portfolio may not have all the options one need, and the core won't be customizable (architectural licenses are out of reach for small/medium shops). The possibility of having customizable royalty free cores with good compiler support, good traction (strong ecosystem), and support available if needed is interesting in this space, and would be new. There are commercial offering with lower royalties than ARM and a flexible offering, but AFAIK not customizable. There are free options with full RTL access like the Latice Mico32 (lm32 in GCC), and although it's supported by GCC it's a small ecosystem and the available options quite basic. In this space RISC-V could be a way to gather a bigger community than what already exists and put resources in common to quickly provide more options to designers. One nice thing RISC-V could bring is that most such "exotic" deeply embedded options are only supported by GCC (or proprietary compilers, ouch). RISC-V has LLVM support, so could support Rust too before other embedded options. For security sensitive applications that could be a plus.