It's also less vulnerable to global trade conflicts. A royalty-free license means that you don't have to depend on a company like ARM for your CPU design. For

It's also less vulnerable to global trade conflicts. A royalty-free license means that you don't have to depend on a company like ARM for your CPU design. For example, if you're a Chinese manufacturer who relies on STM32 chips with their ARM Cortex-M cores and you're worried about the winds of global trade, what do you do? It looks like you make a new line of RISC-V chips with the same memory and peripheral layout. Problem solved: https://www.gigadevice.com/products/microcontrollers/gd32/risc-v/ https://www.gigadevice.com/products/microcontrollers/gd32/ri... And as a consequence, civilians who live in heavily-sanctioned places like Iran can also learn about modern embedded computing more easily on a budget. The economic incentives to produce actual hardware brings the ISA out of FPGA-land, which can improve equality of access and opportunity around the world. It might also help that the ISA is designed in a modular way so that it can be suitable for everything from small microcontrollers to large-scale application processors.