alt Hacker NewsNot to knock on RISC-V, which I’ve been following from the embedded side of things for many years now, but I feel I must question the value of a license-free ISA in this specific market segment at this time.
Surely between the squeeze on RAM and storage pricing and the exorbitant costs of training or mass-inference scale GPUs (if you’re going into AI), the nominal cost of the CPU licensing is really not going to make or brake anything or unlock some new business viability?
Even RISC-V aside, we are essentially in a position that would have been impossible to even dream of ten or twenty years ago when Intel was the only player in the game.
Wouldn’t buying off-lease hardware (not even in bulk) give you better performance per dollar, better compatibility, and more options?
Not to say any of this will always be the case; even if RAM pricing doesn’t come down, storage will, and RISC-V processors will (maybe) eventually actually be competitive when it comes to SOTA performance, but today in 2026?
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The article doesn't put much emphasis on it, but like it says this is still a development system. It's not intending itself to be competitive with ARM and x86 servers for the typical server buyer in 2026.
The point with RISC-V is that you can first pick the architecture and then have many potential providers and you are sure to never be stuck with one provider.
Its not the cost that is the major change, its the business model.
Granted ARM potentially gives you part of that, but its still tricky.
And of course this theory only works out if you have enough competitive providers. But that's always questionable.
I think in the server space the story is more about Chinese autonomy from US regulation/control. As long as they're dependent on closed western IP there is risk of being rug pulled, that having their own RISC-V IP eliminates.
In the embedded / microcontroller space it's a different story. License cost there must be absolutely key, and I think less vulnerable on a per unit basis to the RAM etc storage factors you mention. I don't actually know the numbers but I'd expect that as a percent of total BoM cost the ARM license must be higher for microcontrollers than bigger machines? Maybe someone more qualified knows the answer to this.
The promise of RISC-V is probably not that it cuts pennies of a $1 embedded ARM core (or dollars off a $100 core).
Instead, it’s that Moore’s law keeps on trucking along, so now we have lots of dark silicon (you cannot turn the whole core on at once, or it will turn into a puddle of glass) and specialized silicon.
RISC-V removes all the gatekeepers (except TSMC and the other fabs) that historically blocked new specialized silicon.
I could get an ARM license, but suspect that, at best, that means dealing with sales folks and also building out a legal division just to manage the license.
I could be wrong, but it’s easier to go with the open core, in the same way that I suspect I cannot afford to figure out how much I would have to pay in order to license windows for my servers.