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Could Samsung be the first big defection from ARM since the SoftBank takeover?
It was always thought that, when ARM relinquished its independence, its customers would look around for other alternatives.
The nice thing about RISC-V is that it’s independent, open source and royalty-free.
And RISC-V is what Samsung is reported to be using for an IoT CPU in preference to ARM.
Now SoftBank made a point of saying that its take-over of ARM was to get into IoT. If Samsung is now going to RISC-V for its IoT CPU, this affects the scale of Softbank’s aspirations and may persuade others to defect to RISC-V.
The Samsung RISC-V MCU is said to be aimed squarely at the ARM Cortex M0.
Nvidia and Qualcomm are already using RISC-V in the development of GPU memory controllers and IoT processors.
Although, as Intel found, it’s almost impossible to replace an incumbent processor architecture in a major product area, which means that ARM’s place as the incumbent architecture in cellphones is secure, at the moment there is no incumbent processor architecture in IoT or MCU – so these are up for grabs by any aspiring rival processor architecture.
X86 architecture gave Intel dominance of the large PC market before hitting the smartphone wall.
Cortex architectures gave ARM dominance of the much larger smartphone market before hitting the SoftBank wall.
RISC-V may be the next architecture for the even much larger IoT market (in volume at least).
Intel is a US corporation, ARM was once a british company now under japanese flag : the nice thing with RISC-V is that it is an independent, open source, and royalty free architecture.
This will have consequences over the next decade in the computing race between the US and Asia (think Loogson and now ARM), and may be an opportunity for Europeans to step in and avoid to remain as "The Pacific" of cyber tests.