I’m very excited for RISC-V adoption in the desktop to become mainstream, as it could help to break the duopoly of x86 CPUs by Intel and AMD and encourage more competition, resulting in better value CPUs for us consumers! Being an open standard, any company can improve upon RISC-V, add additional features, make it more efficient, etc. But aside from this point, I haven’t really heard much information about other advantages of RISC-V.
Could RISC-V theoretically be more efficient than ARM, more performant, etc.? Of course, currently, it isn’t, since most software isn’t optimised for RISC-V CPUs and companies have only just started developing them, but if it’s adopted at a scale like x86 in desktop computers or ARM in mobile devices and servers, would it perform better than the x86 or ARM equivalent? Being a newer architecture (2014) than both x86 (1978 for 16-bit) and ARM (1985), does it have additional QoL improvements over the older architectures?
For enterprises, it’s like SaaS vs lifetime license. ARM has restrictions on target market, volume, integration, etc. If you go the RISCV route, you pay once for the design but then the HW is yours to do as you please.
For academia RISCV allows open discussions all the way down for a complete system. Before RISCV can around a lot of academia was splintered around different old chips instead of cutting edge tech.
Current open source RISCV cores aren’t that far behind. They are roughly 2-3x slower for peak performance and maybe a little behind the Pareto frontier as compared to ARM/x86. Commercial cores are even closer within 20-50% depending on which benchmark you believe. A move from open source to commercial or vice versa is possible without impacting the rest of your stack. This is not what happens if you use ARM