Go back a decade or so: how many people thought that ARM could compete against Intel/AMD?
Chromebooks on ARM have already been out for a year. Windows RT for ARM was coming out later in the year. Smart phones are clearly all going ARM. The 64 bit ARM spec was out and people were excited about it.
I think it was a lot clearer that ARM was going to succeed x86, as compared to looking forwards now as to where RISCV will beat ARM.
I do suspect the microcontroller ecosystem will have lots of RISC-V. But it seems a lot less clear that it will succeed ARM in the mobile/laptop/desktop/server markets. I personally do not think that’ll likely happen any time soon.
ARM has so far, outside of Apple and very limited cloud experiements (and some very badly received laptop experiments), not really put a dent in Intel/AMD's markets. But all of this was fueled by the once-in-a-generation explosion that gave ARM untold increases in adoption "for free". RISC-V has seemingly nothing similar, and RISC-V itself certainly isn't manufacturing any such radical shift.
It's a matter of time other shares will be eaten when x86 is having hard time innovating over its decades old design.
More battery time for consumers laptop and less electricity bill for cloud vendors are something very attractive.
Yes, obviously, which I mentioned repeatedly. For ARM to be successful outside of embedded it took an entirely new category of device to appear. What's RISC-V's entirely new category of device where it happens to be uniquely positioned?
> It's a matter of time other shares will be eaten when x86 is having hard time innovating over its decades old design.
Based off of what? The only ARM CPU that isn't thoroughly outclassed by AMD & Intel's x86 CPUs is Apple's, and Apple sure isn't licensing that to anyone. And so far every time ARM has tried to enter the domain of x86 it's been either absolutely embarrassingly bad (laptops) or mediocre at best and only for the very latest generation at that (servers)
> less electricity bill for cloud vendors
ARM server CPUs have the ~same 250W TDPs of Intel & AMD server CPUs. There's no power savings to be had here.
Hello, that would be me? :)
A decade ago was 2011 / 2012. Not a lot ( if not zero ). Even Anand from Anandtech was still cheering on Intel because of Intel's foundry leadership.
Wrote it on Anandtech and AppleInsider ( probably on HN with my old account as well ) the moment Intel decide not to make chips for iPhone or Fab Chips for iPhone in 2011. That was before Intel announced their Customer Foundry. They later went to do a JV with a Chinese company which later become Spreadtrum now known as Unisoc.
The whole reason why Arm competed against Intel and AMD wasn't because of ARM the ISA. It was the business interest and Foundry model. On a projected annual 1.5B Smartphone shipment by 2020 ( Which turns out to be a little too optimistic ), and 150M PC shipment by 2020 and continue to trend downwards. ( A little too pessimistic ) Even had TSMC not taken over the leading edge crown or stayed one node behind Intel the market today would still have been the same. The smartphone market was far bigger than the PC. This actually ties to why people were dismissing moore's law in the late 00s and early 10s. And it was the economy scales that wins.
What turns out to be wrong though was Tablet didn't take over PC. We are not in a Post-PC world. E-Sport (x86) picks up and PC as a Gaming platform is bigger than anyone could imagine. PS4 would move to x86 ( I dont think rumours of PS4 on AMD x86 even began til early 2012, and only partly confirmed by 2013 ) GPU is no longer a Gaming niche but a fundamental in Data Science. The hype of so called Cloud where everyone laughed at or sceptical of ( that is including me ) turns out to be multiple order of magnitude bigger as well. x86 ( Intel / AMD ) thrives because of that.
There is a huge discussion about peripherals and IP. You can buy peripherals for ARM all day long, they’ll work from one chip to another for the most part. Once everyone can “make their own CPU”, expect fragmentation in the peripheral interfaces.
I think low end cortex A and R are where V will shine first. Something like a CISCO IP phone, not an iPhone.
Doesn't that inevitably set up a classic Innovator's Dilemma?
Kinda like how Intel just never cared about going after embedded, and they're not exactly struggling as a result of that. With the big asterisk of smartphones where scaling up proved a quicker path to shipping than scaling down, at which point inertia took over, but for that to repeat would require a currently unknown new product category.
Survive what? I don't see RISC-V disrupting much of ARM's bigger-named business (eg, phones, with some inroads into other things like Apple Silicon & laptops). Maybe Amazon pivots into RISC-V for the next Graviton? But that also seems unlikely unless someone with very deep pockets invests in making an actually competitive RISC-V CPU core at the mid/high end.
ARM's low-end market seems likely to be taken over by RISC-V. So like the Cortex M series days seem numbered without a change in the business model. But that seems like about it.