[cold_pizz4]

While the consumer market is still years away from widespread RISC-V adoption, if you pay attention to the embedded / MCU market (especially Espressif & co) you will indeed come to the conclusion that RISC-V is inevitable and software maturity will probably come from these early adopters.

Go!

[oblio]

I wouldn't bet against software inertia.

x86 only missed the mobile market because of multiple bad business decisions, otherwise ARM (and RISC architectures overall) would have been relegated to more decades as backwater architectures.

There is nothing inevitable about anything as Apple controls its own silicon very tightly, Microsoft hasn't even really transitioned away from x86, and Android probably isn't very keen to transition away from ARM.

Now, embedded markets are different but they've always been different and the number of embedded programmers is dwarfed by non embedded programmers and regular users will for a long time never install an app on RISC-V.

It's an interesting journey, let's see where it takes us in 20 years.

[0x000xca0xfe]

Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.

[pjmlp]

It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis

Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China.

Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

[brucehoult]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices

There were still, as recently as 2025, new smartphones being released with only Arm A53 cores from 2012. Low end, obviously, but equally obviously there is a market for them.

RISC-V SoCs passed that performance mark in 2021 and shipping SBCs are currently at the Arm A76 RK3588/Pi 5 level. In flagship phones that was the Samsung Galaxy S10 generation, but there are still today a lot of budget phones using A76 as the primary cores (usually with some A55s too).

Cores are available for licensing up to around the Cortex-X3 level. Someone just has to be interested enough to put them in an SoC.

It's a business question now, not a technology one.

[crote]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.

[pjmlp]

If the chips aren't fast enough to run a JIT and AOT compiler, a concurrent copying generational GC, along with a modern Vulkan implementation, no one would care, they would be better with feature phones at that point.

[0x000xca0xfe]

They are already. I've got the Spacemit K3 and it is a bit below Sandy Bridge single-core speed - so nothing spectacular - but fast enough for everyday desktop use. And way faster than my old budget smartphone's SoC.

Yes RISC-V has not caught up to modern x86/ARM CPUs like Zen 5, Snapdragon or Apple but still fast enough for modern browsers and most software in general.

Already existing RISC-V CPUs are certainly fast enough to build entry level smartphones. It's probably just a matter of time (3-5 years maybe?) until some Chinese company does it.

[rwmj]

Krste wasn't even saying anything controversial. It's obvious that manufacturers will use the cheapest (free) least legally entangled option, and that this adoption will happen first amongst those with the tightest margins. And - Clayton's law[1] - it will eventually extend to the rest of the market (albeit over a very long time).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

[incrudible]

The good RISC-V designs are not free though and the free ones are not good. MCUs are not a category of computer to draw lessons from for the broader market.

[crote]

The good ARM designs aren't free either. The big difference is that you'll always be stuck paying Arm (either for whole ARM cores, or a licensing fee for your own design), whereas with RISC-V there can be genuine competition between companies offering performant RISC-V IP.

In the MCU market the compute core is already an off-the-shelf drop-in component. Just look at the RP2350: in addition to its traditional ARM cores they also last-minute dropped in two RISC-V cores because it was so trivial to do - and you can select which set is active via a boot-time firmware flag. I very much doubt we'll see that kind of flexibility with high-end client compute, but with the switch to separate compute chiplets we're not far off already!

[rwmj]

is what every company that didn't understand disruption said.

[hughw]

iirc Christenson's chief example was IBM not deigning to cannibalize their high-end disk drive business by competing on the new, less capable low-end devices.

[cold_pizz4]

Wait a few years until a RISC-V Fab as a Service emerges and any teenager with an LLM can design and order their own chips ;)

[Geezus_42]

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