Meanwhile arm licensees shipped twenty-nine billion chips. Most with four cores, and some with many more.
Riscv is on the way up, but any death sentence for arm is decades away.
No matter how you slice up their handset and mobile divisions profits, the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.
Qualcomm could likely pay for most of their chip design costs with the amount of money they’re giving ARM. When contract renewal comes up, Qualcomm will be even more incentivized to move to RISC-V.
Apple has apparently been moving on chip soft cores to RISC-V. At some point (probably around renewal time), they’re likely to want to save money by switching to RISC-V too.
There are even rumors of ARM working on RISC-V cores (I’d guess smaller cores to compete with SiFive).
There’s an economic incentive to change and the only blocker is ARM inertia, but making ARM emulate quickly on RISC-V is almost certainly easier than making x86 and all its weirdness/edge cases run on ARM.
Once the software is in place (getting close) and a competitive RISC-V phone chip exists, I suspect the conversion will be very fast.
It used to be that instruction sets were not copyrightable, and you had to resort to implementation patents to extract money (e.g. the MIPS vs Lexra case https://www.eetimes.com/mips-technologies-sues-lexra-for-pat... )
Well, could not really make the difference between RISC_V and ARM64.
Do I really need to add "on the long run"? Because this is super obvious. That stuff does not happen over night :)
You can feel already the pressure of arm fan boys attacking aggressively RISC-V stuff. This is a good sign.
Don't forget: RISC-V has no strong IP ISA locks like arm and x86_64...
They will all be replaced sooner or later.
I have no particular affinity for arm or riscv. Playing fan-boi for any technology is silly.
There are much more toxic fan boys than some other fan boys...