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RISC-V set to announce 25% market penetration — open-standard ISA is ahead of schedule, securing fast-growing silicon footprint (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/riscv@programming.dev
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[–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

They haven't announced which market that is yet! But, it for sure ain't consumer devices like PCs and handhelds.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    My guess is microcontrollers. Everything has a microcontroller in it these days, it's a huge market and one that doesn't need to worry about stuff like huge ecosystems of existing software that was written for a different architecture

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Certainly not. But they are eating the market from the bottom up. A lot of that share would have gone to ARM previously.

    With RVA23, we are expecting some server class chips in 2026 that will compete with ARM and even Intel. You see Ubuntu positioning themselves for that now.

    In the SBC market, we are going to get Pi 5 or better performance next year as well. That puts RISC-V in contention for many use cases. Mid-range phones and tablets should not be far off.

    It is not going to be laptops and desktops for a bit but it is probably closer than people think. And once it comes, it is going to move quickly. 2030 maybe? How many non-Apple ARM laptops will have gotten traction by then?

    ARM could really get squeezed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Eating the market from the bottom up is also the strategy ARM used to get this successful. But then again, x86 stagnating (or nearing EOL, but I won't make predictions about that) will also have contributed significantly to their success in the high-end market.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Agreed. They are following the ARM playbook but faster. The success of ARM has made it easier. ARM is just starting to take on the server side and RISC-V is about to enter that space with Tenstorrent, Alibaba, Ventana, and others. Alibaba has a talk on the C930 at the RISC-V summit later this month. Tenstorrent has a talk on Ascalon with “now available” in the title. Akeana has a few talks bragging about performance. There is a suspiciously high number of Qualcomm appearances as well.

    Intel could really get squeezed on the server. They have to compete not just with AMD but with both ARM and RISC-V. If you are building out cloud infrastructure that is going to be running end-user Python scripts that wire together AWS web services, who cares what the ISA is?

    I think ARM made a big mistake suing Qualcomm over X Elite. If I was a chip maker, I would use RISC-V simply to avoid the risk of ARM trying to block or dictate my business model.

    And if you are doing AI at the edge, the regular CPU hardly matters. What advantages do ARM and x86 offer over RISC-V there? If none, an open ISA makes sense. Again, just for the control and lack of legal risk if nothing else.

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