[smoldesu]

My (non-professional) opinion is that Intel has invested a lot of money into making really good memory and I/O controllers. We need someone to do that in the ARM space as well, which is a really hard-sell. There are no manufacturers out there that want to pay the ARM licensing fee, period. Apple can eat the costs because they sell direct-to-consumer and like to control as much of their stack as possible. Other companies are probably groaning at the thought of fixing all of ARM's problems just so they can be treated as a second-class platform relative to Apple Silicon. Besides Nvidia or Qualcomm, I don't really think there are many companies poised to deliver this, much less an incentive to provide anything.

RISC-V on the other hand, seems like it could be ripe for rapid iteration. We're obviously still in the super-early days of the ISA, but the lack of oppressive licensing has already been a boon for the dozens of hobbyist boards we've seen released in the past few years. As long as Apple doesn't try to EEE the ISA like they're trying to do with ARM, I think the future is pretty bright for open architectures.