I'm not a hardware guy... but... Take a piece of open-source software. An individual pull request takes no more than a couple months - usually much less. We st

I'm not a hardware guy... but... Take a piece of open-source software. An individual pull request takes no more than a couple months - usually much less. We still get a variety of hobbyists and businesses contributing, and over the years the OSS ecosystem gets better and better. Some software costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build but for these there is usually some open source alternative that's somewhere between "passable" and "much better". I'm imagining a world where you can take a RISC-V design (or equally, some software/firmware for a cheap piece of electronics) and a business can invest some days/weeks making a small improvement (for some benefit to their own cheap product) - or a hobbyist can choose to do it on the weekend. So long as that gets in the open somehow (open sourced or leaked) everyone can benefit. It's a whole different world than a once-every-year-to-18-months chip revision. A "pull request" might only optimize a tiny chunk of the die, but if the pace of contributions is large enough that can add up. Along the way there are still incentives for businesses to invest their time and money.