Are the royalties really such a huge part of a laptop's price? Because other than that, RISC-V's open nature is not really relevant to us consumers, even us techies. It's not like we're going to bake our own SoCs. And the ARM ABI is open as well.
It also has a big head start on efficiency. So for now I think I'd much rather have ARM.
I've seen numbers of 1-3% of the chip price quoted as ARM licensing fees (and presumably the really large customers have their own deals). AFAIK the higher-end RISC-V designs cost similar amounts if you license them.
I really doubt whether this will live up to the lofty promises.
Open software is really something very different from open chip architecture. We're still not able to actually verify that what we get does not contain any backdoors. Unless we have an electron microscope in our basement. Either way we will need a trusted manufacturing party that doesn't incorporate any backdoors like intel's ME. AMD and ARM CPUs have the same thing. I"m sure RISC-V will get the same due to pressure from governments, content providers that want DRM etc.
The main target community seems to be the Chinese manufacturers as they want to have more independence from sanctions.
I'd love to be wrong and for RISC-V sprout an entire ecosystem of really 'free as in speech' hardware under the user's control but I don't see it happening.
"Security"? But we all know here this is a fantasy, and RISC-V won't be an exception.
When I am thinking RISC-V, I am not thinking "security" at all, I am thinking "no toxic IP tied to the ISA".
"Somebody" wants to make a CPU able to run RISC-V machine code? No need to ask some specific MF corpos, and if "authorized", to have to pay that specific MF corpos.
