What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips?
I guess it is more about companies which don't have their own proprietary chips or companies in developing nations.
I guess it is more about companies which don't have their own proprietary chips or companies in developing nations.
Every chip company other than Intel and AMD licenses designs or ISA from ARM. Risc-V has no licensing fees if you design your own, and there are even free designs out there.
It's not feasible to create your own instruction set. You also have to build a whole bunch of software infrastructure for it and convince people to use it and port apps to it. Intel doesn't license x86. ARM costs money, and RISC-V is an open standard that was competently designed by some very smart people. It is also the 3rd most well supported ISA from a software point of view.
For example, when WD open-sourced their SweRV cores in 2019, they also committed to shipping 1 billion copies of the particular design. Beyond just the software ecosystem, they might be looking at incentivizing IP vendors to contribute to a rich ecosystem of interconnects, peripherals, and design/verification software.