Who says you have to fabricate a RISC-V processor on leading edge TSMC nodes? What about FPGAs? What about older nodes? The whole point of my argument is that when you make the proprietary "industry" knowledge more generally available, more people can contribute to the ecosystem as it removes barriers to entry.

> 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-...

Fair enough and I don’t disagree at all but I do think it’s a bit different to software development on that there is probably a limit to how far you can go without one firm spending serious money. As you say it may be Intel - which doesn’t really give me a warm glow.

Shockingly this is not strictly the case anymore and it's become less true everyday.

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

130nm - that was leading edge 20 years ago.

That means we are only 20 years away from running everything on opensource hardware.