[ekr]

The consequences of that are big. This will lead to commoditization of IP cores, cpus, and this will lead to a race to the bottom with the likes of Allwinner, Amlogic, Rockchip, NXP offering products competitive with Intel, Amd, Apple, Samsung. As the margins will go to near-0, companies like Intel will suffer the most.

This is assuming that semiconductor process improvements will significantly slow down or completely stop.

[makapuf]

Agreed this can lead to interesting times again in the cpu space. I guess this can lead to two scenarios : either there are possible improvements that are possible but were not necessary for intel to unleash to be dominant, thus leading to significant improvements (in whichever direction, parallelism, power, cache, price) and compute will be better for the same price thanks to competition or investments won't be worth the perf gains and while prices will go down, performance will stagnate since there won't be much incentive to pay ten times the price for 10% improvements (random BS numbers).

[krackers]

Where would risc-v fit into this? I'd assume it'd help accelerate the commoditization, maybe not in the server space at first but definitely for IoT and embedded applications.