[Discuss] Is RISC-V ready for prime time?

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:25:49 -0400
"Dale R. Worley" <Dale.Worley at comcast.net> wrote:

> the memory, power control, I/O devices, BIOS, etc.  Those aren't
> interesting from an academic point of view, so you can't get the
> universities to do the work.  But with RISC-V, there's no
> manufacturer with a monopoly on the CPU chips that will make enough
> money with its success to sponsor/subsidize all that interface work.

SPARC and ARM architectures succeeded without being owned by
monopoly manufacturers. AMD, especially AMD64, succeeded *despite* the
architecture being "owned" by a monopoly manufacturer.

AMD64 and ARM succeeded for the same reason: they met an unmet demand.
AMD64 succeeded because AMD provided a 64-bit architecture compatible
with the existing 80x86 architecture where Intel were trying to foist
the incompatible IA64 which nobody wanted on the world. ARM succeeded
because Acorn provided designs for ultra-low power CPU architectures
with reasonable performance where none such existed.

Given that there are something on the order of 10 billion RISC-V
cores out there in production world-wide, it's very much ready for prime
time.

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