Why I don’t care about RISC-V
More for them, not for you and I.
One of the tech developments in the last decade that has attracted a lot of attention and money is the ‘open architecture’ called RISC-V. Heralded as The Inevitable Future™ that we all must support or else we’re idiots on Reddit, it’s an open source and royalty-free remake of the ARM architecture we’ve known for decades by now. I don’t care about this development and the reason is simple: it doesn’t positively affect you or I at all. Let’s see why.
The most charitable lens to take in looking at RISC-V is through the eyes of the biggest Santa Clara Valley operation funded to take advantage of it: SiFive. Over the years, they have released development boards with chips that are meant to get people like me excited: another toy for me to port my projects to, right?
Well, I can’t get excited even though I wanted to, and the reason is because I know too much as to why this actually exists. Broadly speaking, there are two clinchers at work that convinced the tech industry to invest in this:
Improving profit margins currently lost as royalties paid to Arm
‘Getting in on the ground floor’ of The Inevitable Future™ where Arm dies to its higher cost basis
When you remember that the tech industry is a lot dominated by greedy delusional gamblers, this is a sick combination. If you’re a thinker you probably already noticed how neither of those things directly involves the general public.
The first reason is cynical and narrow to a fault, and it’s the only future I can concretely imagine existing. It looks like this:
That’s it. Really. A hard drive controller that was previously Arm (and in decades prior was some random architecture nobody remembers). Talk about a marginal revolution. The worst part is, it won’t lower the price you pay for any devices using it at all. Much like the industry’s crusade against inventors under the banner of royalty-free video codecs that suck, the only ones saving money here are corporate balance sheets. Does that get you excited?
“But wait, that’s not all that Arm is,” say the tech mobsters! Don’t you know Apple uses Arm too? We’re investing in the future that some day this device will run RISC-V too!
Remarkably, the proponents still miss the fundamental fact that the RISC-V iPhone will cost as much as it did with Arm. The pennies paid in royalties—which ultimately really fund the inventors that make these things so good in the first place, if we’re being honest—will be sucked up into the balance sheets of the corporations, and investors in SiFive are banking on being first in line to get to do that.
Much as is the case with codecs, RISC-V is another instance of the mob selling out the industry. They’re throwing inventors overboard by ripping off their inventions and freezing the clock on innovation by destroying their incentive to do it, because in their world, smart nerds are fungible assets to be collected and traded like Pokémon cards. They intend to so exclusively own the industry that they simply own every one of them through enabling and never need to pay them a dime as free agents. In the same move they’re consolidating their portfolios to put themselves at the top of this phoney stock market the public has increasingly no part in.
So yeah, it’s pretty easy to see why I’m not excited about RISC-V. You shouldn’t be either.