I will be honest with you. For years, I didn’t quite understand all the attention that the RISC-V ecosystem or the solutions were getting. I saw very small CPU cores being used without high level operating systems in self-contained environments. These were replacing Arm M0 solutions in hard drive controllers. There is value in that, but it’s just not the type of thing that I think changes the game in the industry.
Also, from a business model point of view, you still had to pay somebody to design the RISC-V chip, so what was the point, you’ll either pay the designer or Arm? There are no free lunches. The other thing that was a tad boring was that I didn’t see solutions with a lot of compute power or RAS features that would make a difference in the data center market. Hard drive controller type of CPU performance. Yes, I did recognize the ISA extensibility to accelerators, but it appeared Arm plugged that hole and that it could cause ISA “compatibility” issues down the line.