ISAs have become a commodity. The important x86 patents are all expiring. Nothing would prevent a third party from recreating AVX using different instruction d

ISAs have become a commodity. The important x86 patents are all expiring. Nothing would prevent a third party from recreating AVX using different instruction designs that would avoid those patents too. The non-commodity stuff is all the interconnects, memory controllers, caches, etc. Having access to the Athlon XP or Pentium 4 cache, interconnect, or MC designs simply doesn't matter. Intel has these bits locked down already. As the ISA is commodity, the only parts that matter are efficiency, compatibility, extensibility, and cost. RISC-V allows them to penetrate new markets where x86 either can't compete or people don't believe it could compete because it is much more efficient at the low end. On the high-end, simplifying stuff in one area means you have the ability to increase the complexity and performance somewhere else. On the compatibility front, Apple has already forced their hand by being compatible enough to offer a path to ARM. x86 is not so extensible at this point. Lots of the best instruction encodings are wasted on stuff like BCD and even x86_64 has lots of legacy and extensibility issues. RISC-V not only solves this problem, but Intel is big enough to exert a lot of pressure on future standards. Cost is a problem that isn't to be underestimated. ARM charges 1-3% per chip. That's something like 8-10% of gross margins. RISC-V means Intel can get a new ISA that is already being picked up by everyone (rather than spending billions on forcing a new one only to fail as they've already done). In short, there are a lot of advantages and very few downsides to Intel making the switch.