[wolfgke]

> There are lots of things that cost money in hardware design, and ISA licensing is a very small part of them.

Indeed - and this is exactly the point of ISA licensing (and IP blocks): to make it sufficiently cheaper to just license the ISA or IP blocks instead of developing the product from ground up.

[q3k]

Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.

[wolfgke]

> Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.

I am not convinced that competition is always a good thing here: lots of competitors lead to shrinking margins. This means less money that can be invested into innovating by the respective companies.