Poopernickel posted:

There's a nugget of truth here. I doubt we'll see the rise of commercial RISC-V CPUs (beyond a few hobbyists).

With that said, the core is 100% making inroads into the ASIC market. RISC-V cores are being shipped by the millions in hard-drive controllers.

Ogg was a little better than MP3, but not better enough to displace the ecosystem of MP3 players. And the price of an Ogg encoder is the same as the price of an MP3 encoder - zero dollars. So no real reason to switch.

RISC-V is aimed at displacing ARM. It's deffo not as popular, and the ecosystem is much smaller. But ARM cores cost money to put in your ASIC, and RISC-V cores don't. If you're building enough units, the savings can be compelling.

I think the license cost for a Cortex-M0+ core, buses, etc is something like $0.10-$0.25 depending on your buying power. If you're designing a new controller chip for your widget (and you expect to sell the widget family for a few years), you could save a cool million by using a RISC-V core instead.