[londons_explore]

The size of RISC-V all depends on the decisions by the salespeople over at ARM.

If they see the threat and dramatically reduce prices, ARM will stay dominant while RISCV remains a 'maybe one day' thing.

If they miss the threat, the industry will switch over to RISCV, and ARM will go bankrupt.

The whole RISCV project exists as a bargaining chip against ARM.

[jalgos_eminator]

If RISC-V can create a low cost-of-entry development pipeline with freely available building blocks, then people will still flock to it over ARM even if the price goes way down. Its the same reason that Linux is far and away the most popular OS for hosting web apps: its just stupid easy to get one running quickly and for free. No paying for tools, no stupid licensing agreements, no arbitrary restrictions, and the freedom to change the code as needed.

Unfortunately I also think this may explode the number of "IOT" devices that will be just as badly designed as before (similar to what happened to web apps and phone apps in the last 10 years).

[nickik]

Its not just about price, its about control and time. ARM could make their product much cheaper and people might still pick RISC-V simply because dealing with ARM and getting a deal is quite difficult.

If you need a simple chip, and that's large parts of ARM sales volume there are free chips that you can fully control and its hard for ARM compete.

That said, the idea that ARM will go bankrupt is insane. Of course they will not, the market is not one big market but lots of small once and ARM has a massive head start in all of them.

I see no issue with both ISA existing for quite a long time. ISAs are like programing languages, after a certain size, they can not die.