RISC-V offers great promise: an open source, growing community that will free customers from a single supplier solution. But that isn’t the whole story. Until now, the architecture was at the center of the SoC: Intel, ARM, MIPS. IP vendors picked (or developed) an architecture and fought each other on that basis. The customer “adopted” a vendor’s ISA first, then selected from the cores available from that vendor. Software might be written in C, but was also optimized for a proprietary language and not portable.

Today, cores are selected for what they do for the total design. Can a core solve or improve a system level problem? Is there a marketing advantage to use ARM or RISC-V? What IP surrounds the core and what software runs on the core drives the decision process. And most importantly, most software is written in C.