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Comment by plam503711 | Hacker News Reader

(XCP-ng founder here)

I'm more optimistic for RISC-V. For all the devs who worked on it here (at https://vates.tech), they told me it's very easy to work with since it's close to many Arm design principles.

That's why I believe it's important to prepare the platform today for those future machines. I think it's a great opportunity to not only get an alternative both x86 and Arm, but also really opening the choice of the design, letting new players mastering both hardware and software (I have to admit that's something I'm considering for my business at some point).

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I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip

Most of the big moves in the RISC-V space seem to be coming from the low-end and from China. They might have trouble making the jump to a true x64 M1-like competitor given the geopolitics with cutting edge chip manufacturing (TSMC etc.)

I think other players are going to have funding issues to take on the big players as the open nature of RISC-V seems to mean it's harder to build an IP moat. I've noticed a lot of the Chinese chips come with stuff like NPUs to set themselves apart and presumably get some lock in on their "platforms". But that's just my naiive impression reading some blogs and looking at releases. (ie. I have no idea what I'm talking about)

I don't think it will be "instant change". I agree on the gradual result, but I think it might be faster than we think. Yes, it also depends on the ecosystem, but I think the world is more ready for ISA diversity than ever.

>I think just a lot of the open source community and even ARM itself assumed there would be some inflection point at which point everyone would jump ship to RISC-V. I could be wrong, but at this point it seems more likely to be a gradual change unless there is some key gamechanger piece of hardware like the M1 chip

I don't know why. It's not inherently better than any of the current architectures in meaningful way, just doesn't require license.

IIRC royalty per ARM chip was somewhere in single digit percentages which is basically meaningless for everyone but the chip company, or few big companies making super low margin stuff.

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.

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