It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit.

It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit. Even with Apple Silicon, where the CPU cores definitely look exciting, they spent a lot of time in the presentation on some obscure video codec cores - which enable the insane rendering performance. Microcontrollers are another example: you mostly don't buy them for their computational performance, but for their peripherals. Their USP are the right amount of the right interfaces that you happen to need, a crypto unit, the right number and quality of ADCs or DACs, and so on. I think RISC-V will lead to lots of new chips, with the same old boring CPU core, but exciting new co-cores for special use cases. At least that's what I'm pitching to my boss so he will let me start an evaluation project :)