It has a range of smaller variants, potentially able to cover a range of products including servers, laptops and smartphones.
If a shift happens it would start gradually until a tipping point, then everyone will move so fast it will make your head spin.
Looking at how open source has eaten the proprietary software vendors, I imagine RISC V to follow the same path.
It has but mainly only in areas where adopting it allows cutting costs and is not the end product itself. Not sure why/how could that work for chips. Why would you give out your core designs for free to anyone?
Lots of riscv implementations are closed source though
Also see XuanTie C910, open-source yet competitive with Cortex-A73, been available for years.
Meanwhile, Eben Upton has been falsely claiming that no such cores are available for licensing.
Exactly. Which potentially can make it worse than ARM, making it impossible for new players to enter the market at some point. Catching up would require massive investment and you can't just buy a competitive design of the shelf (looking at ARMs business model licensing your designs to other is just not a good deal and they are effectively still a monopoly in certain segments)
That's a lot of areas for RISC-V.
It doesn't matter to the end user if the end product (Phones, Tablets, TVs, routers, Home automation gadgets, etc) has ARM or RISC-V.
On the desktop, the end-user may care about whether their software still works, and as such the ISA matters.
In appliances, which is where ARM is dominating, the end user's don't care about whether they can run their existing spreadsheets, or powerpoint, or games, or other software that won't be ported. They only care about whether the device is still as usable as their previous device.
If end users cared at all about the ISA, ARM would never have taken off for phones, tablets, etc.
In this space (that ARM is dominant in), the ISA isn't the end-product; the device is.
Yes but it's not about the end users and it matters for the producers. I mean if your core designs are 'open' and anyone can make just as good chips as you what are you competing on? It means you have no margins since you're selling a commodity, which means there is no incentive into investing anything into R&D (unless it allows you to cut production costs).
> In this space (that ARM is dominant in), the ISA isn't the end-product; the device is.
So all new chips will have to be designed in-house by the companies which make these devices (effectively eliminating 'middle-men' like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD etc.) so nobody is really competing on CPUs, since core design can no longer be part of your core business (the same way everyone is using Linux, Android, Blink/Chromium)? Wouldn't that lead to stagnation?
I don't really see this happening with hardware, though. Especially not high-end chips as long as you can gain a significant advantage by keeping your designs proprietary and all 'open' cores are not protected by something equivalent to GPL (which realistically would be very hard to enforce)
The whole industry's buzz about RISC-V is pretty much "yay, we don't need to pay ARM for license".