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Because other companies do, so that's where the action is now. What matters is can we benefit from each others' work, and is there a lot of work being done and

Because other companies do, so that's where the action is now. What matters is can we benefit from each others' work, and is there a lot of work being done and shared by others, to benefit from. It's a (business as well as developer) community, network effect thing. You might as well ask, why did RISC-V succeed while OpenRISC failed? The ISA doesn't really matter. It's not like the RISC-V ISA is mind-blowingly special or anything. It's sensible, it does the job about as well as others. (I say this even though I'm an enthusiast and member of the RISC-V Foundation. I don't think the ISA is the special secret sauce, I think community and sharing are). There are some great ISA extensions, but many of them came after RISC-V had already gained momentum. And those extensions are mostly because there's a diverse community of companies and developers producing them. OpenPower has some of that, but not as much.

drivebycomment 6y ago
Another important advantage of RISC-V is academia. RISC-V has much more mindshare/backing from the university researchers, being started in UC Berkeley with big names like David Patterson. OpenPower...not so much. And I strongly believe university research being on top of RISC-V is the biggest advantage in the long term - what that means is that masters and PhD students will be fully trained on RISC-V ISA, and many new architectural research will be already based on the ISA. OpenPower never had, and likely never will have academic backing. Why would a university research choose OpenPower ? The only scenario I can imagine is if they are pursuing a funding from OpenPower companies, but OpenPower is already a small minority in ISA mind-share and market share, and I don't see any chance of them catching up.