Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting idea, but in terms of the Foundation's actual goal to "advance the education of adults and children, particularly in the field of computers, computer science and related subjects" I cannot see the huge effort required to move to new hardware being a good use of their limited resources. Focusing on improving software and the actual teaching materials/training available to educators would make more sense for their mission.

Then my guess is the Raspberry Pi will be "disrupted", because the hacker/maker community, which may be an even bigger market currently than the "school market", will adopt the fully open source alternative. Some Arduino boards are already starting to support RISC-V processors, so I think it's only a matter of time.

Got a link to those RISC-V based Arduino boards?

IIRC the RISC-V ISA itself isn't finalised so I would be surprised if people were manufacturing it already.

Come on, it's a middle of 2016, everyone gotta know about projects like http://icoboard.org/ , https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/ice40hx1k-evb-open-s... , etc. projects. They allow to have completely open-source process to bring up RISC-V CPUs on a reverse-engineered FPGA. When they collect enough funds (if people of the world will give it to them), they will make ASIC silicon too. The only risk is that big corporations won't give up their prerogative of being the only parties who make the world better, subsume RISC-V and shove out closed-down RISC-V chips like they did before. But how it should work is that there should be competition between classical NDA-ridden and close-down stuff and open RISC-V, to let customers decide what they want in a particular case.

Ah, I thought you were talking about ASICs. Are those FPGAs big enough to support RISC-V?

The closed corporate versions of RISC-V thing is very likely and probably will become the easiest way to get a RISC-V chip.

> Are those FPGAs big enough to support RISC-V

RISC-V is a flexible and configurable architecture, with support ranging from small MCUs to 128-bit ISA which nobody else have yet (for a general-purpose ISA) to tagged memory (which failed to rule the world in 1970ies but now might be just used when gives benefit).

Those FPGAs of course run an MCU variant of RISC-V (as we started with talking about Arduino), e.g. https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32

> align quite well with Raspberry Pi's mission

There're multiple missions, including market and uphold Broadcom Corporation's presence in various niche markets and advertise Broadcom throughout the various industry and market segments (also, for 4+ years, it was "sell old Broadcom stock", but finally they succeeded and RasPi3 has current, not outdated CPU). All big cheeses from RasPi foundation are big cheeses from Broadcom. And they are known to have shutdown third-party vendors who tried to use Broadcom CPUs for RasPi-like designs, nor they fancy using somebody's else chips for their stuff.

Note there's nothing wrong with that - you can sell your chips (or other stuff) and make the world better at the same time (and that's what everyone does on this planet).