Same reason why people would contribute to an open source compiler and toolchain and distribute for less than the cost of the old school paid compiler vendors like Borland. These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply have strategic reasons to drop the floor of that market as much as possible. The same applies to RISC-V cores, with probably the most prominent example being Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores.
Sound more like another "this is the year of Linux"..
Also hardware is pretty different than software. Hardware design (and obviously manufacturing) requires much more significant investment.
> These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply
That's the thing. Apple was/is not in the business of selling compilers, nor are the people/companies who contributed to gcc and most other open-source projects. They have basically nothing to lose and a lot to gain from contributing to open-source software.
It's not obvious to me CPU design could work that way. For starters everyone who could develop advanced RISC-V cores is unlikely to give them anyway to their competitors since they would be in the business of selling CPUs. i.e. do you really think Qualcomm, Apple etc. would make their designs free? Why?
> Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores
Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.
> Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.
This open source core is about equivalent to a Cortex-X1. https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan A collab between Alibaba, Tencent, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
