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> then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own

> then there's potential that customers wanting to design their own stuff will go to them. There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. Licencing ARM for that sort of thing is both costly and a pain in the arse and a distraction from actual processor development. You dismiss startups, but the ripest growth market for processors is in AI accelerators and they are predominantly RISC-V based in the startup world. RISC-V is growing fast and has a structural advantage to ARM's ISA monopoly, in that sense it is a real danger to ARM's business model.

edgyquant 3y ago
> There is plenty of evidence that anyone 'wanting to design their own stuff' are targeting RISC-V. At the moment there isn’t though. Really there is basically none. The largest ecosystems making their own chips are using ARM right now, not RISCV.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  The largest ecosystems that are deployed as production hardware right now, sure. That's because designing a high performance core takes several years, and then getting it into a chip, tested, into mass production, and in to computers in stores or data centres takes another three or four years. RISC-V has only existed as a frozen (ratified) base ISA for four years and a couple of months, and a lot of extra stuff that you want in applications processors for phones or PCs was ratified in November 2021, less than two years ago. You're not going to see a lot of products with the late 2021 stuff until 2025 or 2026. In terms of people starting projects now, or recently, that is indeed mostly RISC-V.