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by Jtsummers 1395 days ago
RISC-V isn't, fundamentally, about pin level compatibility between manufacturers. It's about the ISA and its design. It's closer to AMD/Intel both providing X86 and x64 chips. Software will (mostly, modulo proprietary extensions) run on both, but they are not physically interchangeable. A EE/CMPE (or, more likely, team of them) still has to design the actual physical chips, and that's not necessarily going to be given away so freely.