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ARM Cortex-M is quite likely much smaller and more power efficient than RISC-V will be for the foreseeable future.

If RISC-V is going to go anywhere, it's going to have to start with hobbyists and RaspPi-like devices.

Krste Asanovic in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxuQW8HWBXI shows numbers that the Berkeley Rocket implementation of RISC-V is both faster and has smaller die size than the ARM Cortex-A5 and that the Berkeley BOOM is faster and smaller than the ARM Cortex-A9.

The Cortex-A series are big processors. They're generally used when compute power is more important than power consumption. While it's a promising benchmark, the RISC-V will need to compete with the M-series (and other 8/16 bit cores) to break into the IoT market.

As impressive as that is, I doubt there's much room for RISC-V in Cortex-A's target market (phones, smart TVs, etc etc). I explicitly mentioned Cortex-M.

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