(Top posting because unmangling Evan's message is hard.) For serious applications, the openness RISC-V helps but doesn't make everything you need open and free. Or even available. You actually need chip designs -- what SiFive sells. You also need a lot of other modules for things like USB, PCIe, Power Management, ... ARM has a vibrant ecosystem with all these things available for licensing. And ARM doesn't seem to be too greedy. Even so, it has taken a long time to get ARM processors that match x86 at the high end. So: if you want a short time to delivery, ARM is way ahead. If you think more strategically, RISC-V has some advantages. The US used a foot-gun on Huawei by banning ARM from dealing with Huawei. The largest damage is to ARM: China can no longer think of ARM as a reliable partner. So China will switch to RISC-V (there really isn't a better choice). RISC V International is in Switzerland to try to evade US games. Space stuff has long term horizons. That's another area that has shown RISC-V interest. But that's not a business that uses a large number of processors. Space designs rarely feed back into the mainstream. China is wary of buying from a US company like SiFive. Chinese companies are developing their own expertise and products. So SiFive is surely suffering from the above-mentioned foot-gun blast. As a software guy, I don't actually have a horse in this race. Linux runs on all these platforms. I like "open" and RISC but my desktop is going to be x86 for some time. There are RISC-V Single Board Computers in the Raspberry Pi space but they are inferior to the the Raspberry Pi line and other ARM-based SBCs. Mostly based on the open Alibaba processor designs <https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/10/20/alibaba-open-source-risc-v-cores-xuantie-e902-e906-c906-and-c910/> Seagate disks have RISC V processors but the consumer would never know. ESP32-Cx chips/modules/boards have RISC-V processors. Not powerful enough for Linux. | From: Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | Interesting. | | Of course it is always useful to read beyond the cheery predictions. | Buried under all the positive upward chart lines is the news (from the same | publication) that a major RISC-V "pioneer" has just undergone layoffs (20% | of engineering) and restructuring | <https://www.eetimes.eu/risc-v-pioneer-sifive-takes-stock-realigns-moves-forward/> | . | | - Evan | | On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 11:23 AM Ivan Avery Frey via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | wrote: | | > https://www.eetimes.eu/navigating-the-risc-v-revolution-in-europe/