> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86

> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86 CPUs? Their goal is to be the standard ISA for all general purpose computers; microcontrollers, embedded controllers, servers, HPC, workstations, laptops, smartphones. Microcontrollers happen to be one of the quickest markets to enter with a new ISA. > devices like the ESP32 going for $8 with wifi and bluetooth Well, give Espressif some time, they've been a member of the RISC-V foundation for a while; so I suspect they'll be dropping Tensilica for RISC-V at some point. Maybe we'll see a module like this with RISC-V cores in the nearish future. For now it surely isn't competing in the same part of the market. For what it's worth, the FE310 seems to basically lead in power and peak performance in its category; there are surely some use cases which it is already enabling.