[CharlesW]

I’m interested in what hardware experts think about this too. TFA suggests an opportunity for deeper/proprietary silicon designs, which might be a nice way to create a moat before WinArm PCs and laptops arrive.

“SiFive can offer something Arm cannot, flexibility. Customers can modify their cores by adding hardware accelerators directly into the vector register file. This can be used for extending the X280 core to applications such as DSP, image signal processing, and AI.”

[humanwhosits]

I guess with ARM they can either design their own cores, or buy arm's, but not other arm architecture licence holders. With riscv they can do their own design or choose from a larger list of competing vendors

[pinewurst]

Makes me wonder if ARM licenses will soon mandate that all processors in an SoC be ARM. There’s a certain hint of ARM desperation in their treatment of Qualcomm over Nuvia IP.

[snvzz]

That would only result in no processors in a SoC being ARM.

At most, they'd get some licensees to comply for a single generation of chips. The next one would have given them enough time to rid of ARM.

For most licensees, it wouldn't even be possible to release one generation like that, as most are licensing IP blocks from multiple vendors, which might internally use whatever ISAs. Obviously, the owners of these IP blocks would hurry up and move to RISC-V, too, in order to protect their business models.

[kaszanka]

I don't understand this, aren't the AMX instructions[1] an example of an Apple-proprietary ARM instruction set extension?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32722510