Having divested the design services team, SiFive has just raised a $175M round – at a $2.5bn valuation.

In itself, thsat would not suggest valuation or interest in RISC-V will decline.

But more interesting is that the money was from Coatue. Hardly a VC style “take a bet” on a cool technology or team, but more “we have analysed the fundamentals and this is a strong market”

“RISC-V house SiFive is coming for Arm’s crown”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/risc-v-house-sifive-is-coming-for-arm-e2-80-99s-crown/ar-AAVciVj

Intel has seen a lot of interest surrrounding the ISA – hence their investment in RISC-V.
https://www.design-reuse.com/industryexpertblogs/51438/intel-embraces-the-risc-v-ecosystem-implications-as-the-other-shoe-drops.html
They’re going to be playing a huge role, I think, in facilitating the production of RISC-V designs. Their own fledgling attempt – Horse Creek – is due out, at least in alpha, by the end of this year. Isn’t that in itself, an extraodinary thing?

I mentioned that Alibaba had sold over 2.5Billion RISC-V chips. Andes Technology has sold over 10Billion cores, SiFive another couple of billion. And there are any number of companies, including Espressif Systems (who have a RISC-V Esp32 variant) with designs (some of which are open source). There are RISC-V microcontrollers in a lot of consumer electronics already – fron Nvidia and Western Digital though to Samsung and Huawei.

You’re absolutely right of course to point out that computing is always a tendem of hardware and software. Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Haiku, SkiffOS have already produced operating systems for RISC-V. And as for apps, there is a lot of work ongoing, not least here:
https://lists.riscv.org/g/software/message/174

But, as I said before, the real impetus will be coming from China, who will produce cheap, RISC-V consumer devices for their home market, and then for neighbouring markets, and low-economy markets. And their processors are likely to be open source too.

But I would not agree that interest in RISC-V has peaked.

Quite the reverse.

SiFive is not selling out – quite the reverse. Threy are doubling down on RISC-V. They are selling selling a design services operation to invest proceeds in RISC-V. I never understood why the board agreed to buy it. VC money (WACC) paying for (unscalable) body-shop business was always daft.

Meanwhile Andes has raised money for their rights issue to invest in RISC-V.

Customer concerns on Arm as a monopoly are still very strong, and the concerns over being dependent on them are still very real. Companies may have been complacent on those issues in the past, but now they have been scared they want the option of an alternative.

RISC-V is ideally positioned as that alternative. It is not really “open source” – a better analogy would be to consider it an “open standard” like LTE (but with no essential IPR).

It is much like TCP/IP beating SNA, or GSM beating cdma2000: competitive markets based on open standards with compatibility win out over proprietary solutions.

Some companies might chose to do this themselves, with the associated costs. But most will buy from commercial RISC-V licensors: SiFive, Andes, Codasip etc. They have the same IP business model as Arm (and the same economics in that regard) but benefit from interoperability abd a pooled eco-system spending costs across a wider base. Lower cost for developers (and hence users), with more competition and innovation.

RISC-V is moving up in performance. Arm is still ahead but the gap is closing fast.

Yes, software porting has a cost, but Apple as shown (twice: PPC to x86, x86 to Arm) it is far from insurmountable. The existence of a very strong ecosystem on RISC-V with support for all standard tools, compilers, libraries etc make this much easier.

Arm has many challenges for their IPO. The combative threat from RISC-V is definitely one of the most serious.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/15/arm_job_cuts/?td=rt-9cp

Still think Arm Ltd is in good shape?

Sure, on the face of it, RISC-V is just a single side of paper – but actually, that’s part of the appeal: it’s a freely available design, which encourages creativity. Moreover there’s open source software available for design and verification. Students have been working with it for over a decade now, graduating into industry. There’s even funding available. In short: there are no impediments to the adoption of this easy-to-understand, barnicle-free ISA.

You’re right to point out that there are already embedded and microcontroller level implementations of RISC-V, such that, even before the proposed Nvidia takeover, Arm were having to change their licencing for these processors. They were also trying to sell off their IoT subsidiary.

There are also a number of well-thought out extensions – particularly the Vector extension – now ratified, which makes RISC-V suitable for other computing sectors.

RISC-V’s been verified by industry and tech luminaries as a good ISA, to the extent that a number of them have left prestigious positions in top tech companies to start-up RISC-V design companies. They’re aiming for high-end and edge implementations : going head to head with Arm. And given that RISC-V has been shown to be able to beat ARM on PPA, well, the race is on.

Meanwhile Arm Ltd. remains in a very precarious position. Softbank, so far as I’ve heard, haven’t moved their position regarding the sell off of Arm. The whole point of the Nvidia/Arm deal was that Arm needs a significant injection of cash in order to finance their next geneation of processors in X86’s realm. Arm itself fears that a floatation might just be a load of investors trying to milk Arm. Their best hope is for a consortia of interested paties (as Qualcomm sugested) to effectively put the ISA into a foundation – much like RISC-V is. But there may still be trust issues if Arm is majority-bought by a competior company… like Nvidia.

But the real elephant in the room is the US Tech Trade War. China – one fifth of the electronics consumer marrket, and one of the leading producers of consumer electronics – has vowed to go US-IP free. By 2019 Alibaba had a family of RISC-V processors, some of which can run Linux – they’ve sold at least 2.5Billion of them! CAS have promising RISC-V designs too. There’s a laptop being built this year, and the promise of a smartphone next year. Even if they’re still for development purposes, the intent, and the progress is very clear. And that is going to be hugely influential. (The EU is looking for processo sovereignty too.)