I wouldn't bet against software inertia.

x86 only missed the mobile market because of multiple bad business decisions, otherwise ARM (and RISC architectures overall) would have been relegated to more decades as backwater architectures.

There is nothing inevitable about anything as Apple controls its own silicon very tightly, Microsoft hasn't even really transitioned away from x86, and Android probably isn't very keen to transition away from ARM.

Now, embedded markets are different but they've always been different and the number of embedded programmers is dwarfed by non embedded programmers and regular users will for a long time never install an app on RISC-V.

It's an interesting journey, let's see where it takes us in 20 years.

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0x000xca0xfe 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis

Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China.

Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

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crote 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.

Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.

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pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

If the chips aren't fast enough to run a JIT and AOT compiler, a concurrent copying generational GC, along with a modern Vulkan implementation, no one would care, they would be better with feature phones at that point.

	▲	0x000xca0xfe 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They are already. I've got the Spacemit K3 and it is a bit below Sandy Bridge single-core speed - so nothing spectacular - but fast enough for everyday desktop use. And way faster than my old budget smartphone's SoC. Yes RISC-V has not caught up to modern x86/ARM CPUs like Zen 5, Snapdragon or Apple but still fast enough for modern browsers and most software in general. Already existing RISC-V CPUs are certainly fast enough to build entry level smartphones. It's probably just a matter of time (3-5 years maybe?) until some Chinese company does it.