this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Everything that you say is correct and accurate. Definitely there will be big companies that will create designs and keep them behind their IP walls. However, there will also be some small companies, which otherwise would have been unable to develop their own designs, which will be able to create something compliant with the instruction set and have Linux kernel up and running, with most of the GNU/Linux ecosystem available to them. This is a really big thing. Also, if the small manufacturers follow a common fully open standard (which is in their interest) the benefit will be huge for everyone, users included.
Yes, the benefit of RISC-V I can see is that if a large company, let's say intel, designs a high performance CPU, a small company can also create a compatible alternative CPU. I don't think the small companies can really compete in performance with the large ones, even if you manage to create a good CPU once it's not simply feasible to keep up with hundred times larger r&d teams in long term, but there is a place for the smaller CPUs filling specific niche use cases.