@landley @dalias @stman @OS1337 I do agree that #RiscV has the chicken-egg - problem and those currently invested in it are mostly those fleeing #ARM and their shift from licensing their ISA and extensions on a per-chip - flat fee basis to a percentage of the sales price of the final product containing it, because they assume that'll be way more mone.
We see that with #WesternDigital, which already have some capabilities but as you correctly point out, even #WD won't have tooled up to the point that they can vomit containers of SoC's on the market that are competitive in price to their #arm64 competition...
Maybe if the #Enshittification of ARM accelerates faster we'll see licensees like #MediaTek shift gears - espechally when their currently negotiated terms run out and ARM gets too greedy...
As a public Corporation, ARM are legally required to maximize earnings and profits for their shareholders by all means legally possible!
That being said, it's almost always a price/performance decision - maybe restricted by thermal/power envelope (i.e. mobile/edge/embedded computing devices: One cannot hold a smartphone in their hands if it were to output 35W+, also there are safety limits in terms of temperature with skin-co tacting case parts and the Chips themselves...) and only in the low-end it's a matter of just pricing (i.e. costs for #DevKits and low quantity orders of #PiPico vs. #Atmel #ATMEGA), because again: Innovation moves upwards.
Which is why everyone doing some #IoT / #EdgeComputing gadget starts prototyping with like a #RaspberryPi (or clone of it): Because they are cheap (when available at MSRP) and avialable (when not scalped) to the point that if someone fecks up a board it's cheap enough to replace on a whim...
Kevin Karhan 
Marcus "MajorLinux" Summers
Kevin Karhan 
