What's the reason behind companies adopting ARM instead of the open standard RISC-V? E.g. Apple designs its own chips, wouldn't it make more sense to use RISC-V instead of paying fees to ARM?
Also Apple already hold a perpetual license for the ARM architecture, the major costs of their investment in it were spent years or even decades ago.
The obvious counter is the sunk cost fallacy, but what does RISC-V actually have to offer that Apple doesn't already have with ARM? Those sunk costs have bought Apple actual tangible benefits on ARM that RISC-V doesn't have, such as architectural features like the secure enclave, better device integration, better GPU options, more mature device driver support, a stronger development and testing tools ecosystem.
The opportunity for RISC-V is new use cases not already strongly addressed by ARM, or where ARMs more mature ecosystem offers weaker benefits, for companies not already strongly invested in ARM.
Apple has a platform with hundreds of millions of active users, perhaps over a billion actual devices in use. In a situation like that, conservatism is warranted. The guiding principle is simple: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Meaning that the argument doesn't start with any sort of discussion about technical advantages that RISC-V might have over ARM, or challenging reasons to stay on ARM as if, having dismissed them, the obvious default plan of migrating to RISC-V would kick into action. It starts with trying to demonstrate that something about ARM is broken. Because, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So. . . is it hindering Apple's strategic or operational priorities in any way?
RISC-V is promising, but it's not there yet. A small company like Pine64 isn't necessarily going to have the resources to, for example, get the Linux kernel support for RISC-V into a production-ready state.
Apple, for its part, adopted ARM years before the RISC-V project even started.
Companies have been successfully working with ARM for a loooong time. It's a massive, well supported, ecosystem that works quite well (no customer complains about delayed/cancelled products related to ARM's performance). What does RISC-V offer that's worth jumping into the void?
That's startup territory, you won't see big companies betting big on RISC-V for a while, if ever.
*Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, FB
[Edit 1]: A quick search throws up that Google, IBM, SONY etc are already members of RISC-V foundation.
Also, https://riscv.org/2018/08/eet-asia-article-microsoft-and-goo...
Why would a nation choose to go to the moon, or build something otherworldy?
I think RISC-V will eventually come to consumer facing (rather than embedded) products, but it might take another 10 years.
Getting ATX (or other standardized) form-factor boards with chips big enough to test applications on, in my opinion, should be a high priority. As much as people talk about "post-PC" or whatever, PC-form-factor computers are the center of development and understanding, especially for server applications.
Being able to buy or use existing power supplies, chassis, disks, NICs, and GPUs (and maybe DIMMs, if that's not a massive engineering challenge) and put together a "PC" I think is really the key to development of the architecture, and they're a portal to applications like Windows laptops (see Qualcomm AArch64 laptops) and Chromebooks (big part of what I was thinking of when I begun and abandoned porting V8).
If there were ATX form-factor AArch64 boards available for less than a thousand bucks early on, it would have hit Android and laptops possibly a year or two earlier, with significantly less specific investment from ARM Holdings.