I'm curious why you think RISC-V is the future and not ARM. I guess part of it depends on how far into the future we're looking, but it doesn't seem like ARM license fees are so high that they're prohibitive.
ARM generates less than $2B in revenue. Apple posts $275B in revenue. Are ARM's fees just a rounding error to anyone with scale? And ARM knows that it needs to remain competitive on its licensing fees to make sure that people don't move to RISC-V.
I'd guess that a lot of ARM's revenue actually comes from the processor design, not the ISA. ARM will license you cores. RISC-V won't license you cores since they're not designing them.
It's possible that RISC-V will see great things, but I'm kinda thinking that ARM's license fees probably aren't much. Apple especially wouldn't be paying much since they're not licensing cores. Anyone that is licensing cores would need to replace that R&D with their own - which might be more expensive than it's worth. Qualcomm seems to still lean on ARM's designs.
And I think there's certainly a big head start in optimizing things for ARM that will be tough to overcome.
I just think it seems unlikely that current customers will drop ARM to save 0.1% of their revenue - especially if they need to start taking on the costs of designing the chips themselves, contributing to compilers, etc.
The exception I can see is China. China might want a free-and-clear route to their own processors without worrying about other nations denying them access to IP.
I suspect it's due to fundamentally different ownership forces acting on the ISAs. ARM may be a good choice now, but it's recently been put into the hands of someone who has a stake in the market which buys ARM licenses (Nvidia), and became non-neutral.
> I'm curious why you think RISC-V is the future and not ARM
I don't really, I was just keeping the comment short and avoiding the ire of any RISC-V fans. It could be either, but it's important to remember that instruction sets don't usually win solely based on merit.
For example, if you read most compiler books - because they were written in the early 2000s or late 90s, they spend almost all of their time discussing various RISC architectures (particularly the Alpha). The (then) 386 is usually mentioned in passing, ARM isn't even mentioned at all.
(You probably can guess what I'm getting towards) They're all dead, somehow ARM lives. It's also not really a question of money, Itanium wasn't that bad and Intel couldn't save it.
If I were God, the only CPU that I really really want to see make it to Silicon (even just to see if they're right) is the Mill. Even if they can't walk the walk it's a really nice concept (I think the belt will see use after their patent expires)
> I'm curious why you think RISC-V is the future and not ARM
I'm not sure Risc-V will win out over ARM, but if it does, I think the acquisition by nvidia will play a big part of it. It really depends on how open and cooperative Nvidia is with ARM IP now that they have it.
ARM generates less than $2B in revenue. Apple posts $275B in revenue. Are ARM's fees just a rounding error to anyone with scale? And ARM knows that it needs to remain competitive on its licensing fees to make sure that people don't move to RISC-V.
I'd guess that a lot of ARM's revenue actually comes from the processor design, not the ISA. ARM will license you cores. RISC-V won't license you cores since they're not designing them.
It's possible that RISC-V will see great things, but I'm kinda thinking that ARM's license fees probably aren't much. Apple especially wouldn't be paying much since they're not licensing cores. Anyone that is licensing cores would need to replace that R&D with their own - which might be more expensive than it's worth. Qualcomm seems to still lean on ARM's designs.
And I think there's certainly a big head start in optimizing things for ARM that will be tough to overcome.
I just think it seems unlikely that current customers will drop ARM to save 0.1% of their revenue - especially if they need to start taking on the costs of designing the chips themselves, contributing to compilers, etc.
The exception I can see is China. China might want a free-and-clear route to their own processors without worrying about other nations denying them access to IP.