> But I don't see how RISC has any hope, as ARM is already everywhere You are ignoring the very low end. ARM requires a royalty. It's not much, but it is wha

> But I don't see how RISC has any hope, as ARM is already everywhere You are ignoring the very low end. ARM requires a royalty. It's not much, but it is what it is. RISC-V requires no such royalty (that I know of). At the lowest end kind of chips, a fraction of a penny royalty is a big deal. Currently, those chips currently all use proprietary designs. All the tools supporting those chips are absolute trash, as expected. Converging to a single architecture that can use all the same design tools and software ecosystem would be a big win. I view RISC-V like I view autoformatters. It actually kinda sucks, nobody likes it very much, but converging to a single point brings more benefits than holding to your own unique opinions. Aside: If I had my drothers, I'd converge backward to something like DEC Alpha EV-4/EV-5 (21064/21164). EV-4 was good enough to provide the basis for the StrongARM architecture. The software tooling for those chips still exists even if a bit dusty. MIPS dumb-ass byte access patents have long expired so we can have real byte access instructions. And in-order execution is often a plus in the embedded world rather than a minus.