[swamp40]

Small ARM Cortex's have taken over the microcontroller market. Billions made each year from every large microcontroller manufacturer. They aren't going anywhere. It's hard to believe ARM wouldn't make enough from licensing fees and from each one sold to make an easy profit. Maybe the license doesn't account for individual sales, IDK?

New secure ARM Cortex's are launching everywhere too, so they are very much alive and well, for the next 20 years minimum.

[fundmondawyaya]

Small RV32/64 cores could supplant them.

For example, GigaDevices makes an STM32F1 clone which comes in two flavors with the same peripheral memory map: ARM Cortex-M3, or RV32IMAC.

[swamp40]

Lots of things could supplant them, but the base is too large now and it has grown to cover the entire ecosystem.

They spent the last 10 years beating out PICs, 8051s, etc. Because they were BETTER.

And now a million engineers now how to use them, and the tooling from 1000+ companies is all in place to support them.

They aren't going anywhere.

[fundmondawyaya]

I dunno if Cortex-M chips will be better for long, though. Some of the RISC-V specifications like interrupt controllers need a bit more time, but they have very good support in mainline compilers like the GNU toolchain.

My experience writing C for RISC-V MCUs is about the same as doing so for Cortex-M platforms. They're a bit low-volume/expensive atm, but the core is very appealing to chip makers because it has solid software support and no royalties.

I also wouldn't write ARM off, though. Their 'coming-soon' MCU neural accelerators could open a lot of doors if it works well on a low power budget.

[chmod600]

"They aren't going anywhere."

That seems to be said of a lot of things that do end up disappearing. Hard to tell whether there are real roots in the market or if it's going to evaporate like so many other things.

[humanwhosits]

Bill Of Materials.

ARM will have to lower prices, as if you can save even just 1 cent per-device by using RISC-V in your microcontroller..