Yeah, they could but then what is the market? Qualcomm wants to sell smartphone chips and Android can run on RISC-V and most Android Java apps could in theory run.

But if you look at the Intel x86 smartphone chips from about 10 years ago they had to make an ARM to x86 emulator because even the Java apps contained native ARM instructions for performance reasons.

Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.

Nvidia could also make RISC-V based chips but where would they go? Nvidia is moving further away from the consumer space to the data center space. So even if Nvidia made a really fast RISC-V CPU it would probably be for the server / data center market and they may not even sell it to ordinary consumers.

Or if they did it could be like the Ampere ARM chips for servers. Yeah you can buy one as an ordinary consumer but they were in the $4,000 range last time I looked. How many people are going to buy that?

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adgjlsfhk1 an hour ago | parent [-]

> Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.

That definitely seems to be the case. I think they likely would have more luck with Riscv phones (much less app brand loyalty). or servers (arm in the server has done a lot better than on windows)

For Nvidia, if they made a consumer riscv cpu it would be a gaming handheld/console (Switch 3 or similar) once the AI bubble pops. Before that, likely would be server cpus that cost $10k for big AI systems. Before that, I could see them expanding the role of Riscv in their GPUs (likely not visible to to users).

	▲	lizknope an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Many PC hardware enthusiasts say they want a RISC-V or ARM CPU but then when these system exist they don't actually want them. Why? Because they want something like a $300 CPU and $150 motherboard using standard DDR4/5 DIMMs that is RISC-V or ARM or something not x86 but is faster than x86. The sub $1000 systems that hardware companies make that are RISC-V or ARM chips are low end embedded single board systems that are too slow for these people. The really fast systems are $4000 server level chips that they can't afford. The only company really bringing fast non-x86 CPUs with consumer level pricing is Apple. We can also include Qualcomm but I'm skeptical of the software infrastructure and compatibility since they are relying on x86 emulation for windows.