ARM Windows has existed for absolutely years. First version was in 2011 iIIRC. I'm not shitting on things I don't know about - I'm just pointing out how I've seen the market evolve.

I said "mainstream consumer and business appeal" this whole thread is about laptops, not servers. Linux OWNS the server space. Linux does not have any mainstream appeal in the LAPTOP space. No matter how much you try to take that quote out of context.

> Raspberry Pi had 95.82 million GBP revenue.

Do you have a source on that? Highest I saw after a quick googling was 71m. Though, that's revenue and not profit. Twitter makes a ton of revenue but no profit for example.

> Raspberry Pi had 95.82 million GBP revenue

Raspberry Pi makes a lot of their money selling to businesses for commercial use.

A small powerful lightweight power efficient computing device is of course very popular to install in many kinds of equipment, not just makers.

That’s a very niche market with those revenues in the tech space. Not saying they won’t do well, but it’ll come down to price. It won’t succeed if it doesn’t align with the niche market at a price they’re willing to pay in terms of features and benefits. The question will be, so they get enough sales to get the scale necessary to make this cost effective.

Right, edge computing. Very different than desktop/laptop.

The original post is not about SBC it's about modular laptops. No one is saying riscv SBC would not be a big market. The whole thread was about laptops and their marketplace.

a) RISC-V is a general, abstract and formulaeic scheme for how computing elements will work together. There's nothing that stops Intel from offering their compute elements as part of a RISC-V design. Which will have very obvious usage-scenarios, and will have abysmal performance. But there is nothing stopping Intel from doing that.

b) There are parts of Intel that certainly had ambitions of not being married to the cisc-designs from the 90s forever. But those parts of the company mysteriously suffer layoffs, or else are shut down altogether. Projects they are involved in - by sheer chance, I'm sure - end up modifying the prototypes to include monolithic designs with "secret" cisc-optimisation on closed fpga-solutions.

c) Although Intel were promoting a "silicon pre-production stage" of Risc-V chips, this project is now cancelled. They are not producing any Risc-V chips -- no one are producing Risc-v chips. There will be chips based on the schema, for certain, but they will not be the kind of chip that will have the makeup of a protected, instruction set bound specific fpga. In other words: nothing stops Intel from marketing their bullshit offering as "RISC-V", even though they might not offer much in terms of performance, or really use the overall schema at all. That's what they have been gearing up towards, and that's what failed. That's why they now have nothing in it. It's literally not compatible with their "Business model".

d) The Risc-V international foundation - by sheer chance, I'm sure - has relocated to Switzerland in order to specifically -- by sheer chance -- escape very specific concerns about US trade regulations and potential lawsuits.

e) The contribution to this foundation from Intel was 1bn dollars. It's a vanishingly small sum in the sceme of things.

Lastly: is really Risc-V a competitor to arm? I hear tons of people say that, and I certainly read it in industry insider-infested american (spiritually or otherwise) publications. But is it really the case?

What is the case is that ARM offers a very specific type of solution where their basic functions can be enhanced by adding various instruction sets. The m1 at Appul is probably a well known enough example, where adding instruction sets to the hardware layer, both programmable to a certain extent and specified on beforehand, is part of the design. A lot of Arm's customers do not use this part of the design at all, though. And there has been a very specific push from Qualcomm, among others, to gear ARM into having higher core-speeds and better out of order single instruction performance.

ARM's reaction to that has been to produce what the customers want, but there is a very obvious problem here in that as these chips are more and more geared into where the design just does not have any actual strengths - that it will be immediately gobbled up by if not Intel's x86 offerings, then AMD's. So as an alternative Risc-based schema takes shape -- a screaming necessity if you know anything useful about programming, I could add -- what that means is that ARM will then be able to compete with general Risc designs on specific applications. While the codebase that is needed for both ARM and RISC-V to have any point whatsoever - will be developed.

As opposed to being supplanted by an attempt to get x86 into the mobile sphere, and into anything, like Intel has been attempting for decades now. And where they actually have succeeded to a certain degree thanks to the power of marketing, lawsuit and a throwaway budget for this that dwarfs the GDP of a medium-sized European country.

So no - ARM is not a direct competitor to RISC-V, or vice-versa. The road back to RISC will happen, and Intel will not be part of that. At least not in the way the company does business now, or the way it has done business in the past. Intel will disappear as the company it is now, if it even becomes involved with making general contributions to Risc-V schema type chip clusters. And that's just not going to change, regardless of how many billions of dahllars go into marketing.

You will claim differently until the end of time, I'm sure. But your opinon, as shocking as it may seem, does not, in fact, alter reality.

> RISC V is a competitive chip architecture to ARM.

RISC-V is not a chip architecture (micro architecture), it's an instruction set architecture.

> I don't think hitting the market necessarily needs to be a point of open-source or open-hardware.

So what is the whole point if you don't want to be in a market?
Just releasing a concept is completely mute if there are no products, no pushing for the technology to be adopted.
It is like inventing a flying car, only not to actually make one. Yeah its cool you invented it. But... it is irrelevant if there are no actual flying cars to buy or use.

In order to move into it, you need products, support, something to drive people to move into it. That the people around them start using it, they start using it, more companies and more support, more hardware connectivity and more upgrade and support from different chip manufacturers.

Without any of that, it will be just like that cool replaceable modular mobile phone. Cool concept, irrelevant since it doesn't really exist. Did the idea drove anything? Did it have value? Not really. Anyone moved into it? No.
Same here. Why? Because no product existed to drive that market forward.

And just to drive that point in.
There was that company that made hand help little and terrible computers that did not last long not were any powerful.
But the did have a product, that sold a tiny bit compared to the whole market.
And it was the single thing that drove what we know today as a smartphone.
The palm pilot.
Why?
Because there was a product. They made them. They showed “see!? It can be done!”. And the market took notice, and to one company in particular. And the rest is our current time.
Do you think we would be here if it was just a concert with no application? Maybe but much later.