If nothing else it breaks the stranglehold the 2.1 x86 licensees (Intel and AMD) have on the Windows market. Its just that that market is much MUCH smaller than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Right? I’m much more excited to see RISC-V start to become more powerful and have more commercial offers of hardware to compete against the global tech brokers. We need the FOSS version of hardware or else our future privacy and ownership rights will forever be in jeopardy with info tech.
RISC-V is just an ISA, the same for ARM and other RISCs and CISCs. There’s no guarantee that RISC-V will be any freer than current CPUs, because the actual implementation and manufacturing are the job of the OEMs.
RISC-V is an open standard under an open and free license. Which means that it doesn’t require an expensive proprietary licensing fee. It is the necessary development bed upon which open source hardware can be created. Effectively it means that it has the potential of creating cheaper hardware that manufacturers can create with lower cost overhead and whatever improvements they make upon the designs can be used for free by other manufacturers.
The RISC-V ISA is free and open with a permissive license for use by anyone in all types of implementations. Designers are free to develop proprietary or open source implementations for commercial or other exploitations as they see fit. RISC-V International encourages all implementations that are compliant to the specifications. […] There is no fee to use the RISC-V ISA. FAQ
While all other ISAs are proprietary standards that charge chip designers up the nose to even look at the specifications. Hence why there’s so few chip manufacturers in the world.
If nothing else it breaks the stranglehold the 2.1 x86 licensees (Intel and AMD) have on the Windows market. Its just that that market is much MUCH smaller than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
So we replace two players with one (ARM)?
Right? I’m much more excited to see RISC-V start to become more powerful and have more commercial offers of hardware to compete against the global tech brokers. We need the FOSS version of hardware or else our future privacy and ownership rights will forever be in jeopardy with info tech.
RISC-V is just an ISA, the same for ARM and other RISCs and CISCs. There’s no guarantee that RISC-V will be any freer than current CPUs, because the actual implementation and manufacturing are the job of the OEMs.
RISC-V is an open standard under an open and free license. Which means that it doesn’t require an expensive proprietary licensing fee. It is the necessary development bed upon which open source hardware can be created. Effectively it means that it has the potential of creating cheaper hardware that manufacturers can create with lower cost overhead and whatever improvements they make upon the designs can be used for free by other manufacturers.
While all other ISAs are proprietary standards that charge chip designers up the nose to even look at the specifications. Hence why there’s so few chip manufacturers in the world.