[throwaway40483]

As the article (and you) point out, the datacenter and mobile space is already lost to Intel and ARM respectively. The only path forward is through the IoT space. It's the only area where you might need something even smaller than ARM.

[PeCaN]

ARM Cortex-M is quite likely much smaller and more power efficient than RISC-V will be for the foreseeable future.

If RISC-V is going to go anywhere, it's going to have to start with hobbyists and RaspPi-like devices.

[tnorgaard]

Krste Asanovic in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxuQW8HWBXI shows numbers that the Berkeley Rocket implementation of RISC-V is both faster and has smaller die size than the ARM Cortex-A5 and that the Berkeley BOOM is faster and smaller than the ARM Cortex-A9.

[Thrillington]

The Cortex-A series are big processors. They're generally used when compute power is more important than power consumption. While it's a promising benchmark, the RISC-V will need to compete with the M-series (and other 8/16 bit cores) to break into the IoT market.

[PeCaN]

As impressive as that is, I doubt there's much room for RISC-V in Cortex-A's target market (phones, smart TVs, etc etc). I explicitly mentioned Cortex-M.