[GTALUG] risc-v seems to be gaining traction

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Warren McPherson via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Amazon gets behind free rival to Arm’s microchips

Most Amazon comsumer products contain ARM.  But they are just part of SoCs 
that ARM buys (it doesn't design or produce them).  Of course that could 
change, but why?

The main Amazon exposure to ARM is the Graviton processor.  I *think* they 
buy the design of the ARM core used in that chip from ARM corporation.  
Nobody yet has a RISCV core for sale that is as fast.  Amazon could 
develop one in-house but that would probably take several years.

My guess: a clean sheet RISCV design could beat an ARM, modestly.  That's 
because, after all these years, the ARM architecture has quite a few 
barnacles.

Apple designs the cores of its ARM implementations.  But they have a 
pretty good license perhaps from the founding of ARM (with Acorn).

It's hard for Apple to switch because of the binary software distribution 
model.  They are just starting to migrate users from X86-64 to ARM.
Quite a history:
Motorola 68000 => Power => x86-32 => x86-64 => ARM64