| "Fully open systems are an entirely ideological win at this point with a now sub-$50 entry point setups available today." It's not entirely ideological. The advantage an open, license-free, RISC-V brings to the table is ISA flexibility and freedom, the ability for people to bring innovation in terms of extensions, create their own flavours. And where we'll hopefully see this innovation is in realms like AI and graphics and vector. e.g. bringing compute back in from the GPU, by chip producers bundling extensions into their custom RISC-V implementations and then providing the requisite add-ons for llvm, SDKs, etc. We've already seen the excellent things Apple was able to do with ARM because they had the chip under their own control and were no longer beholden to ARM^H^H^HIntel (or Motorola/IBM before that). I am hopeful we'll see similar excellence around RISC-V. (EDIT: I had typo'd "ARM" here but meant to write Intel) Though this will all come at the cost of some amount of fragmentation, at least the base instruction set is standardized, and a standard method for extension put in place. |
Sorry? Apple remains an Arm licensee and everything they have done will be consistent with the terms of their license.