Comment by cmrdporcupine
9 hours ago
I don't think that's the primary reason there's momentum there. The reason is to avoid ARM licensing fees and IP usage restrictions.
I think you'll see ever more accelerating RISC-V adoption in China if the United States continues on its "cold war" style mentality about relations with them.
That said we're a long long way from Actually Existing RISC-V being at performance parity with ARM64, let alone x86.
Yep, licensing fee and IP usage restrictions is a massive decision point on some silicon markets.
The other massive point: RISC-V integrates a lot of CPU "we know now" in a very elegant "sweet spot".
And it is not china only, the best implementations are US, and RISC-V is a US/berkley initiative re-centered in switzerland for "neutrality" reasons.
If good large RISC-V implementations do reach TMSC silicon process (5GHz), some markets won't even look at arm or x86 anymore.
And there is the ultimate "standard ISA" point: assembly written code then become very appropriate, hence strong de-coupling from all those, very few, backdoor injecting compilers.
On many of my personal projects, I don't bother anymore: I write RISC-V assembly which I run with a small x86_64 interpreter, that with a very simple pre-processor and assembler, aka SDK toolchain complexity close to 0 compared to the other abominations.
And I think the main drawback is: big mistakes will be made, and you must account for them.
Standard ISA being rv64gc? Isn't MIPS 2 easier to emulate? It has less funky encoding.