I wonder if this is a more common name for silicon in some other part of the world (I'm in the US). I don't think I've ever seen this spelling before today, and I'm not a young person.
The word Silicon 'feels' wrong to a Dutch speaker because it makes it sound like integrated circuits are made out of the same stuff used to assemble aquariums, fake boobs and heat-resistant flexible cookware. That stuff is called 'siliconenrubber' or 'siliconen' (depending on the application and who you ask) in Dutch.
[1] a bit like vi vs emacs for chemistry in other words
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not just a story, it is the story. The story of our planet, Earth, a planet-sized computer built by the Amaltheans to find the definitive question to life, the Universe and everything for which the answer is '42'. Things went awry when an ark full of telephone cleaners crashed on the planet/computer which made it come up with the wrong question. The book only mentions that they'd have to build a new Earth to run the program again but now it can finally be proven that they did no such thing - they just used the old one and recycled the top layer of the machine's substrate and left us the evidence: sand. Billions of tons of recycled computing equipment cover our beaches, filling up the bottom of the seas and covers parts of the planet.
Think about this the next time you're laying a brick wall, pour some concrete or are annoyed by the gritty stuff between your teeth when you eat your lunch on the beach. You're literally eating computing history and who knows what effects that will have on the final outcome.
And it sounds like you're saying aluminium got corrupted into aluminum, which is not the case.
For a long time I assumed that Silicon is the "unofficial", American word for it, while silicium is the scientific name.
RISC-V likely has a future in mobile devices as it crawls up the performance tree like ARM did. This leaves ARM in a tight squeeze between x86 on the top and RISC-V on the bottom.
And don't be mistaken, there is no perfect ISA (it is said "average"), it does not exist, only a set of trade-offs and compromises which will not fit all use-cases perfectly.
RISC-V is a US Berkley initiative. Have a look at wikipedia where you'll find most of the answers to your questions.
That said, to be a success, RISC-V will need _extremely_ performant implementations all across the board ("embedded", desktop, server), micro-archs and silicium process. It will have to survive its mistakes: for instance critical bugs in its major micro-archs or design flaws (you have to presume it will happen).
And without access to the best silicium process, it _WON'T_ have performant implementations. Because there is no "enough" in the silicium industry, it wants always more transistors and less power consumption, and each new silicium process brings significant improvements on those metrics.
This is where chinese chip designers are in trouble: Taiwan has the foundries with the best silicium process, and now you get US restrictions on EU EUV tools.
Even though I wish intel and amd to switch to risc-v in the not to far away future, I would give attention at the people over there who would try to torpedo RISC-V. The other one, ARM, well, they will try everything to sabotage it, RISC-V is a death sentence for them... unless they clearly move to RISC-V ultra performant micro-arch design.