[petertodd]

I wonder if they're using the same die for one or more microprocessor products that are RISC-V-only or ARM-only? They could be binning dies that fail testing on one or the other cores that way. Such a product might be getting sold under an entirely different brand name too.

[jsheard]

They're not currently doing that but there is a documented way to permanently disable the ARM cores, so they could sell a cheaper RISC-V-only version of the same silicon if there's enough demand to justify another SKU.

[baby_souffle]

That may be the plan for the future. Right now, this is a hedge / leverage against negotiations with ARM. For developers looking to test their code against a new architecture and compare it to known good code/behavior, it doesn’t get any easier than rebooting into the other core!