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by qwytw
1277 days ago
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> smaller manufacturers who have zero attachment to ARM and would much rather build hardware on their own terms Or they believe that designing their own cores would be cost prohibitive and prefer licensing them from ARM. It's also not obvious to me than licensing conditions for RISC-V could be more favorable than what ARM is offering. Why would you anyone even license competitive cores their competitors if they can make more money selling them themselves? |
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There simply isn't that much money in designing cores. The money is in selling SoCs or devices. Arm at least has made increasingly high quality cores available at reasonable prices to all comers. A future where Arm's business is made unviable is not necessarily better for consumers.
You can license RISC-V cores from Si-Five today but they if reports are correct they were in discussions to sell to Intel. If that were to happen who knows what would happen to their offering. There will be others of course but as you say it's not obvious that what they offer will be any better that what Arm offers today.
And for the foreseeable future Arm is immune to takeover by any of its deep-pocketed customers.
I'm very happy that RISC-V exists from a number of perspectives but there needs to be a realistic assessment of its potential impact.