RISC-V for hobbyist like me is just WAY WAY easier to deal with. There is a great consistency between RISC-V 32-bit and 64-bit which ARM lacks. There is just one compressed ISA and it maps to the regular one in straight away manner. Register naming is more sensible and consistent.

ARM instructions with their complex addressing modes are not easy to read. ARM vector instructions makes your head explode trying to keep all the details in your head at the same time. RISC-V vector instructions are just way easier to grasp.

In many ways it reminds me of the documentation situation with Python vs Julia. Python has more documentation for sure, but a big problem with that is all the stuff that is outdated irrelevant, combined with the difference between Python 2.x and Python 3.x although that has gotten easier in recent years.

New technologies will always have less documentation but they often benefit from not having lots of legacy which complicates understanding.

At least ARM is easier than x86, but that is a pretty low bar.

You're not wrong in your assessment. However you're looking at it as it is right now, as opposed to where it's headed for in the future and what it could ultimately become. While CG and computer hardware are very different fields, the effects of communal knowledge sharing are very similar and very powerful. When bored high schoolers and broke college kids (and curious adults) can tinker with the tech, they enter the industry with that much more experience and/or have another avenue for career transition. And that is far more valuable than the mild (and sometimes nonexistent) conveniences of ARM over RISC-V.

In the first case anyone with the right skills can do it. In the second you need access to lots of specialist tools / proprietary industry knowledge.

If RISC-V 'wins' in application processors it will be because an Intel or a Qualcomm invests (probably) hundreds of millions in building a team that works on a multi year project. It definitely won't be bored high schoolers.

> In the first case anyone with the right skills can do it. In the second you need access to lots of specialist tools / proprietary industry knowledge.

In the first case, it used to require specialist tools like the Autodesk suite, and people had to have access to that software to develop the right skills and acquire the industry knowledge.

I don't think RISC-V "winning" is the right way of measuring success. Whether or not it becomes the dominant ISA for everything is irrelevant. It serves an important role in our market and it doesn't need the guys at Qualcomm and Intel to use it to make it successful. Either way Intel is investing big money into RISC-V: https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-invests-in-open-source-r...

Also, careful what you say about high schoolers: https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/13-year-old-nicholas-sharkey-...

https://info.efabless.com/press-release-efabless-launches-ch...

I was going to use that exact wording in a different comment but decided against it, spooky

I mean there was clearly a lot of analysis put into aarch64 - which probably involved Apple etc - but I've seen comments previously saying they obviously got it wrong because [insert some headline design decision].

They might have got it wrong but they're definitely not amateurs at this and you can't prove anything with a one line comment.

I feel ARM could go the Docker way, who faced a similar foe in the stakeholders seeking to commoditize their core business... ruthlessly stomped on them, creating k8s, runc, registries, microvms, serverless, and what-not. Despite Docker having stellar engs working for them (and in some cases, better tech: Swarm, for instance), there's nothing they could do.

The Tencent and Apple of the world are...Tencent and Apple.

If Amazon say decided to throw billions at developing a Graviton 4 using RISC-V...they really couldn't leverage much of their previous Graviton development work. They also wouldn't have a deep bench of low level RISC-V wunderkind to bring on board to leverage the new platform. It's a chicken and egg problem.

Why would Amazon then want to pay to bootstrap a whole RISC-V market? That's a lot of CapEx without a clear potential for returns. You'll note they did develop Graviton using the ARM ISA so they didn't have to create from whole cloth a "Graviton" market.

Amazon made the same decision as PC makers in the 80s. They consolidated around the IBM clone architecture to take advantage of the rest of the market, especially Microsoft and IBM, supporting the IBM clone market. Commodore, Atari, and Apple all had to fight uphill against IBM clone market.

I haven't seen any technical advantage of RISC-V over ARM that would suggest it's worth pouring billions of development dollars into. It might make sense for Western Digital for drive controllers but not phone, tablet, PC, or server makers.

Now, if someone would create a RISC-V core competitive with the Arm server cores, and an ecosystem of RISC-V compatible peripherals (well, not compatible in the sense that some random peripheral would need to care about the ISA, but that Arm might not want to licenses their peripherals to a RISC-V based project?) shows up, I'm sure Amazon could do roughly the same with a hypothetical RISC-V Graviton. But if you're talking about designing a RISC-V core from scratch, that's a whole different ballgame.

This is my point. Amazon using ARM lets them tap into the huge ARM ecosystem with minimal investment on their part. The cores they're using have known qualities and meet whatever performance targets they want.

At this point RISC-V doesn't have that same ecosystem. It doesn't even have extant high performance cores someone can just order. Building momentum is expensive. If selling that ecosystem isn't your main business it's probably not worth investing millions or billions to develop it.

RISC-V has geopolitical advantage however in that it's not controlled by US/UK.

I can see why Amazon wouldn't pay to bootstrap that, but I can see why Tencent/Huawai/Alibaba would try to.