this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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I think they mean that ARM became dominant by widely licencing its RISC architecture to pretty much anyone. This startup wants to make RISC V designs and licence them to various chip manufacturers - so they won't be in the business of making chips themselves, just the design.
But as long as they are RISC V chips, then they would run the same software as any other RISC V chips.
Not necessarily, RISC-V is permissibly licensed, so they could add proprietary extensions, that would make the binaries or even compilers only work with their implementation of the RISC-V ISA.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish tactics would work on RISC-V, and I trust billionaires and huge corporations to enshittify it.
Big player joins RISC-V, creates design, introduces proprietary extensions, builds compilers that use them, software depend on them, other RISC-V designers need to license them, because the whole platform now depends on them.
Also based on how complicate it is to port Linux to different SoCs, which at least share a common ISA, it will be much more difficult if you need to support even more RISC-V ISAs with different proprietary extensions, not only in the kernel, but in the toolchain as well.