> It is not remotely competitive with any ARM processors

It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores.

> and for those used in smartphones, there is no indication it will be for at least another 10 years.

I mean, shitting out a new high perf uarch isn't the easiest thing in the world, but you're literally commenting on an article from Huawei claiming that they had. And now Moore's law is more or less mined out, which means it's no longer a Sisyphean task to chase the perf dragon.

> It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores.

He may also have been thinking about things like toolchains and debugging tools. There are several professional IDEs geared towards ARM embedded development

> There are several professional IDEs geared towards ARM embedded development

Having been an embedded developer for around a decade, yeah they exist but are absolutely terrible. I seriously don't understand how Keil, Metrowerks, and IAR still make sales. Like, they're somehow worse than the FPGA toolchains I had to deal with.

If RISC-V doesn't get those parasitic business models attached to it, it'll be better off.

One very interesting development is MIPS open-sourcing all(?) of its IP.

From what I understand, MIPS cores are already quite competitive with ARM, with good support for FP etc., and the MIPS ecosystem is quite good.

IDK, the MIPS announcement was worrying to me. IIRC it's only open for 'MIPS Open Registered Companies', ie. it's open in that they're open to the idea of providing source to the normal customers they have, sort of like Microsoft has ways of giving companies, governments, and academia the Windows source.

The dude who bought MIPS is a sales guy who I don't really think understands open source.

It'd be awesome to be wrong about this though.

What IDEs/toolchains do you tend to actually use/see used in industry?

I've used all of the above and shipped code with them; when coming into a project it's more important to get things done than bitch about the gains other tools get you.

When starting a design from scratch, my own proclivity generally goes towards gcc/clang +some commandline build (make, cmake,.etc), openocd+gdb, and an eclipse project built up that's ready to go for those who like GUI editors. That free stack tends to have less bugs than the above tooling and way more examples for when you want to do something weird.

There are tool makers and IDE makers that support RISC-V already. Look at the list of companies, it includes quite a few companies like that.

Of coure ARM is way ahead but RISC-V is catching up and people are trying to innovate.

I've heard hardware guys complain about saving pennies. When you're manufacturing millions of units then saving 20 cents on each of them absolutely does matter. Obviously saving 20 cents now doesn't offset all the other issues with RISC-V but saying it's meaningless to cut out 20 cents is not correct.

I don't think that's what stefan_ wanted to say. I think it's rather that RISC-V isn't effective enough (yet) to be suitable for scenarios where the main thing you optimize for is something other than cost (like heat dissipation, power use, performance, etc). For scenarios where these things don't matter, but cost is very important, RISC-V is the ideal choice.

The problem is that most of these companies will still use commrecial soft cores. Meaning that you still pay for the RISC-V chip most of the time. So it will probably be cheaper, but your not saving 100% most of the time.

There are some companies where is is a huge issue. However for others its all about avoiding up front cost. For others its about flexibility. For others its about narrow innovation.

I'll bet that in <= 6 years we will see popular mobile computing devices with RISC-V applications processors.

But you're right that those will probably be the last to switch. Most SoCs have plenty of ARM cores that could be swapped with RISC-V cores without significant (or even any) impact to vendors.

Maybe you should actually inform yourself before posting a definite statment like this.

That no RISC-V processor is competitve with any ARM processor is just straight up nonsense. RISC-V ISA wins in most metrics against ARM amd chips that implement it get higher performance on the same gate count.

Your next claim that 'its all about that 20c licencing cost' is further nonsense that simple is not reflected by most companies in the RISC-V space. It probebly true for some, but WD for example has said that just based on cost they would not switch.

Next lets talk about high end cores. Esperanto technologies is gone licence a 7nm RISC-V Core that competes directly with A-72 and A-76. That not as advanced as some of the cores you can licence but its very competitive in terms of soft-ip.

That all said, mobile application processors will be a few years away but the primary issue is not the core performance itself.