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A comment on Building a RISC-V PC. Parent comment

Re:Building a RISC-V PC by wolfgke on Friday February 08, 2019 @05:14PM (#19119182)
> There are lots of things that cost money in hardware design, and ISA licensing is a very small part of them.

Indeed - and this is exactly the point of ISA licensing (and IP blocks): to make it sufficiently cheaper to just license the ISA or IP blocks instead of developing the product from ground up.

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Re:Building a RISC-V PC by q3k on Saturday February 09, 2019 @06:39AM (#19121832)
Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.
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Re:Building a RISC-V PC by wolfgke on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:33AM (#19122443)
> Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.

I am not convinced that competition is always a good thing here: lots of competitors lead to shrinking margins. This means less money that can be invested into innovating by the respective companies.

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