Did you see the list of partners in the announcement? Its one thing to say that linux runs on your core, its another to have a supported release by every major

Did you see the list of partners in the announcement? Its one thing to say that linux runs on your core, its another to have a supported release by every major distro along with other OS's people want to run working (windows/etc). It might be said that is the harder piece of work because its not just engineering but politics and business cases. So beyond that there is an incredible amount of engineering work required to get lots of application stacks to perform well on an architecture. Its one thing if a core is similar performance/watt given some small benchmark suite. Its another to get specJBB or other random large application suite running well. There are literally tens of thousands of pieces of code here or there that need to be ferreted out and fixed, from adding crytp/vector instruction support, to lock tuning. There is also the experience of finding edge cases in the system architecture that don't perform well in a given situation and need to be modified in a future design. That is something you get with a mature architecture and something the arm ecosystem has spent the last 7+ years working on with organizations like linaro and in major projects like the linux kernel, gcc, clang, openjdk, android, etc. Missing a 20% performance optimization somewhere in a 100 million line code stack can be the difference between performing like a 7 year old core from your competitors or being seen as equal. Now all that said, risc-v has plenty of opportunity, investment, etc. Nothing I've said above is unique to arm/x86/power/etc its just a matter of putting the effort in. That work hasn't yet been done for risc-v, so its a natural fit for small limited microcontroller/embedded applications where the software stack is more controllable, rather than general purpose high performance applications (phones, servers, etc).