My two cents: * It is hardware's linux moment. The entry cost is low, everything is customizeable to your client's needs, everything can be inspected and modif

My two cents: * It is hardware's linux moment. The entry cost is low, everything is customizeable to your client's needs, everything can be inspected and modified. Everybody can copy-paste a SoC, do some plumbing; and hit the ground running. The conditions are perfect for ownership to be shared. As it is the first to do so, RISC-V will ride the first-mover advantage. * New great tools are being created, and given away for free. * Economics are changing. It is apparently possible now to buy tiny areas of a mask set for 30k USD, and have the results in shorter times. This means short and cheap iterations. Garage level silicon startups are becoming a thing; and the intricate corners of the market will get filled exactly to their need. * Physics has been depleted. Walls everywhere. Power wall, clock wall, Moore's law. The only way to offer better performance now is opening things to customization. This is why we're seeing AWS pushing FPGAs as a first class citizen. This is why we're seeing Google's TPU. Microsoft is toying with FPGA-based networking, and you can bet there will (RISC-V?) silicon once their use case settles. Generic CPUs will become rarer, you will host your webservers on a GoLangChip™ with hardware support for GC and actors. * More customization means RISC-V will be the chip of IoT; in which power consumption, size, performance requirements will be to the extremes of the envelope. If you have a niche market and simple things to do, and you customize your silicon well; 0.01 mm^2 of solar panel can power 0.01 mm^2 of chip. Dust computing could be a thing for select workloads. * David Patterson says so. ---- On your question to choosing between RISC-V vs ARM or MIPS, I say it does not matter that much if you need a general purpose CPU. On the other hand if you gain something from having the thing customized (power consumption, memory access patterns, some DSPs here and there); then you should choose RISC-V because someone will do it for you at low costs. Choosing RISC-V now leaves the door opened to these customizations. ---- On another note, I think that in the future we will wonder why we spend so much time bikeshedding javascript vs java vs ruby vs php vs python. All those things only run on a CPU.