A quick Google search for the number of processors shipped in 2024 shows nVidia shipping one-billion riscv _cores_ last year being pretty big news. Assuming they were one fourth of the market, and that there was just one core per chip (certainly not true) that’s four billion cores.
Meanwhile arm licensees shipped twenty-nine billion chips. Most with four cores, and some with many more.
Riscv is on the way up, but any death sentence for arm is decades away.
Qualcomm is rumored to be paying 2-2.5% per chip instead of the 5-5.5% ARM sued them for (some sources claim it was 6-10%).
No matter how you slice up their handset and mobile divisions profits, the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.
Qualcomm could likely pay for most of their chip design costs with the amount of money they’re giving ARM. When contract renewal comes up, Qualcomm will be even more incentivized to move to RISC-V.
Apple has apparently been moving on chip soft cores to RISC-V. At some point (probably around renewal time), they’re likely to want to save money by switching to RISC-V too.
There are even rumors of ARM working on RISC-V cores (I’d guess smaller cores to compete with SiFive).
There’s an economic incentive to change and the only blocker is ARM inertia, but making ARM emulate quickly on RISC-V is almost certainly easier than making x86 and all its weirdness/edge cases run on ARM.
Once the software is in place (getting close) and a competitive RISC-V phone chip exists, I suspect the conversion will be very fast.
> the current cost is billions just to license an ISA.
It used to be that instruction sets were not copyrightable, and you had to resort to implementation patents to extract money (e.g. the MIPS vs Lexra case https://www.eetimes.com/mips-technologies-sues-lexra-for-pat... )
Apple probably pays a lot less than Qualcomm? They have a unique (details unknown) license. They have a license to 2040 now too: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...
I do write RISC-V, x86_64 assembly, and I had to code a bit of ARM64 assembly (because of an old RPI).
Well, could not really make the difference between RISC_V and ARM64.
Most architectures never actually die. New architectures just snap up the balance of the new designs. That said, a competitive license-free ISA is quite attractive to a lot of people, and once the snowball gets moving it will grow in size and pick up speed.
????
Do I really need to add "on the long run"? Because this is super obvious. That stuff does not happen over night :)
You can feel already the pressure of arm fan boys attacking aggressively RISC-V stuff. This is a good sign.
Don't forget: RISC-V has no strong IP ISA locks like arm and x86_64...
In the long run we are all dead. So a “death sentence” far enough out is meaningless. Riscv killing arm is pretty distant.
They will all be replaced sooner or later.
I have no particular affinity for arm or riscv. Playing fan-boi for any technology is silly.
At least, I did not choose the side of an ISA with global super strong IP locks like some...
There are much more toxic fan boys than some other fan boys...