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This paper http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-14... pointed to in the article posted here, claims higher performance per Mhz and lower power consumption than ARM in table 2.

Still, that requires some chip maker to build a SoC around a RISC-V CPU that attains these efficiencies in the real world.

The paper makes these arguments for RISC-V:

• Greater innovation via free-market competition from many more designers, including open vs. proprietary implementations of the ISA.

• Shared open core designs, which would mean shorter time to market, lower cost from reuse, fewer errors given many more eyeballs3 , and transparency that would make it hard, for example, for government agencies to add secret trap doors.

• Processors becoming affordable for more devices, which helps expand the Internet of Things (IoTs), which could cost as little as $1

The first point is not very concrete. China has long had some of their own MIPS-based RISC CPU designs, and they are most likely to act on the transparency issue. That leaves super-cheap processors for IoT. ARM may be able to deliver pricing and value that's better than free.

And all this assumes very low friction in the form of, say, Android adding this ISA to the standard set of compilation targets for native code, and, to ART pre-compilation.




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