Comment by sylware

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.