[IshKebab]

Good question. I looked it up and apparently the royalties are around 2% of the price of the chip, so it probably won't make a huge difference. They do also charge an up front "membership fee" which seems to vary from $200k to $10m depending on the chip.

RISC-V is very very popular already, but most RISC-V cores are not user accessible. They're controllers in hard drives, embedded management cores in SoCs, etc. Definitely nice to not have to pay for licensing that, and verification doesn't matter so much since you are more likely to be able to work around bugs in software.

I suspect it won't make a huge difference to visible CPUs. Probably the biggest impact will be flexibility.