the expensive part of an arm license isn't the money, it's the fact that you have to deal with it (and be highly reliant on a 3rd party that doesn't share your interests).

Unless you design RISC-V core yourself that doesn't change with RV. Still need to find someone that will license you core (remember, ISA is the free part, not implementation).

I guess if using one of the open cores is enough in your use case that would make it easier.

it also means what you know you can switch vendors without rewriting code. you need to license the core, but you have options on who to license it from.

I’m interested to hear what you think the structure of the market for licensed RISC-V cores will be. How many vendors will there be and where will the revenue to support all these vendors will come from? At the moment licensing cores is not a massively lucrative business.

I don't know, but it seems likely to me that it should be able to sustain a few companies. All the really high end stuff will probably be first party developed (e.g. by NVidia) and not sold to 3rd parties, but there are a lot of places where flexibility is more important than raw performance. It's possible that market will be fulfilled by open source cores, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some medium sized companies that make a business out of 3rd party custom chip design.