And where are those chips going to be made? The issue with Intel's dominance is it's complete dominance on the supply side as well.
You fail to realize that this isn't like 3D printing, or other low volume manufacturing. You can't just setup a 100nm Si lithography lab in your spare room and churn out RISC-V chips.
In 5 years - realistically we will have a few high performance(non-mobile) ARM chips manufactured at economic scale. Any other type of disruption would require Intel and AMD to fail and relinquish the supply side capacity... or China investing billions into new chipmaking facilities now.(it takes a few years to build that capacity)
China already has 14nm online, and should have 7nm in a year or two, so that means that we will probably see some real RISC-V chips from there soon, if sanctions continue.
So I think that we will have a four way competition between Intel, AMD, Apple, and Chinese RISC-V chips.
That being said, I don't see x86 dying, I think AMD and eventually Intel when they wake up will be competitive.
When you say they "should have 7nm in a year or two," are you just banking on them copying or stealing a European-made EUV machine?
China cannot be competitive at the razor's edge if its semiconductor companies depend on promptly copying/stealing technology that European, Taiwanese, and American companies bring to market.
7nm doesn't require EUV. Intel has 10nm which is equivalent to TSMC 10nm without EUV, altough it's not that great.
SMIC has already produced some 7nm chips without EUV.
As for EUV for the further future, there has been quite a bit of research in that domain for many years in pre-emption of this, and while I think they will be a node or a node and a half behind for a while, they will almost certainly have one ready eventually. Of course, that will be accelerated by stealing data on EUV machines, or maybe buying a used EUV machine from someone and reverse-engineering it.
I don't see X86 dying either, I think it will be dominant in the desktop/laptop segment for a long time. I am not sure why Longsoon uses Mips64 over RISC-V. Is RISC-V generally available and ready for prime times?
I think Longsoon still uses MIPS64 because of institutional knowledge. It's moreso Alibaba and HiSilicon that I think are promising, and they both seem to be getting on the RISC-V train.
That is a great question. I am not familiar with how much the production of these CPUs are dependent on ASML, TSMC etc. I think think China is kind of forced to have its own supply chain after the Obama era ban on Intel chips in Chinese supercomputers.
You fail to realize that this isn't like 3D printing, or other low volume manufacturing. You can't just setup a 100nm Si lithography lab in your spare room and churn out RISC-V chips.
In 5 years - realistically we will have a few high performance(non-mobile) ARM chips manufactured at economic scale. Any other type of disruption would require Intel and AMD to fail and relinquish the supply side capacity... or China investing billions into new chipmaking facilities now.(it takes a few years to build that capacity)