Genuine question - other than increasing the number of players, what is the horizon of value for new processors to begin with ? Is there anything more impactful than squeezing a bit more performance/watt ?
cost. it is stupidly expensive to include any sort of commercial MCU core(s) in your chip. Ancedata: ARM won't even talk with small ASIC fabless companies, even if they are willing to shell out big upfront costs and royalties per chip that ARM demands. Having free or affordable alternaties is a great driving force for the industry.
> ARM won't even talk with small ASIC fabless companies, even if they are willing to shell out big upfront costs and royalties per chip that ARM demands
[Citation needed] There's literally 0 upfront costs for a Cortex-M3 [0]
If Moore’s law is indeed over and quantum computing isn’t a silver bullet (even if they get it to work), then the future will be clever design rather than raw horsepower in order to increase the speed of computation.
It has the potential to spawn a new eco-system. Like if you look at what happened with the raspberry pis. Other players could have pulled that off technically but didn't attempt it.
raspberry pi didn't really have a new processor though. The original had an ARM11 core (designed and verified by ARM) that was almost a decade old when the raspberry pi launched.
They also leveraged existing Linux drivers and other hardware that was available to integrate without big problems.
Spawning new ecosystem is not about making something completely from scratch like processor. One have to align a lot of stars in the sky to make that happen. They had a specific goal and niche where they planted the seed for RPi.
