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Licensing innovation - The open licensing model, anyone can make a RISC-V implementation, there's some rules/costs involved if you want to use the RISC-V tradem

Licensing innovation - The open licensing model, anyone can make a RISC-V implementation, there's some rules/costs involved if you want to use the RISC-V trademark with it: https://riscv.org/about/risc-v-branding-guidelines/ https://riscv.org/about/risc-v-branding-guidelines/ but certainly a lot cheaper and permissive than arm's architectural licensing model. This enables far more competing RISC-V implementations, with more choice and more ability to modify things to your needs. On the downside you could see eco-system fragmentation and lots of subtle incompatibilities causing issues for broad software support. Ultimately anything technical happening is secondary to this, this is the reason RISC-V is taking off, not anything to do with technical superiority (it simply needs to be good enough).

hakfoo 4y ago
"Good enough" is an incredibly big thing. RISC-V doesn't have to displace M2/Epyc/Xeon to be important. There are a trillion cores a year being shipped in embedded devices where "cheap and configurable" is more important than raw performance. What surprises me is that we haven't seen more "built to emulate" designs yet. Many of those "trillion cores" are zombie architectures with terrible price/performance ratios, but nobody wants to rewrite their software or retool things (anything 8051, AVR or PIC seems vulnerable). I could see replacement modules using a cheap-due-to-scale RISC-V core that just emulates the old chip in baked-in firmware.