[eddyb]

I agree that ARM isn't going anywhere, as long as it can be licensed for less than it takes to design a good-enough RISC-V core, it will get used (with opensource designs slowly lowering the latter on average).

It's really more the small vendor ISAs that I expect to become rarer with time, not the existing ISAs to go away.

Frankly, RISC-V feels perhaps a decade too late, but so does LLVM, and alternate history is such a rabbit hole so I won't go into it (but I suspect e.g. Apple would've had a less obvious choice for the M1, if RISC-V had been around for twice as long).

> But that also seems rather narrowly scoped to those who are willing to design & fab custom SoCs

I'm expecting most of the (larger) adopters are already periodically (re)designing and fabbing their own hybrid compute + specialized functionality - like the WD example you mention (Nvidia replacing its Falcon management cores being another).

I don't know for sure, but I also suspect some of them also want to avoid having Arm Ltd. (or potentially soon, Nvidia) in the loop, even if they could arrange to get their custom extensions in there.

[monocasa]

> I agree that ARM isn't going anywhere, as long as it can be licensed for less than it takes to design a good-enough RISC-V core, it will get used (with opensource designs slowly lowering the latter on average).

You don't have to design it yourself. The foundaries are working towards free hard cells of RISC-V cores in most of their PDKs. It's hard for ARM to compete with free.