First of all: the licensing of RISC-V is much cheaper than ARM. I've seen Chinese RISC-V MCU's that only cost a dime or less. And these aren't itty-bitty 4-bit parts mind you, but comparable to ARM M0 or M4.
Secondly, there are numerous open-source RISC-V designs out there to give any company a head start and the freedom to modify it as they see fit.
Those OSS RISCV designs are academic largely. True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced.
A head start is great but that still costs expensive skilled engineering time to actually make a worthwhile product. And due to licensing of OSS, it may be a bad thing for a company to build their multi-billion dollar business on something they need to open source for someone to immediately knock them off and kill their business.
In the hardware world, we live and die by our design secrets. If someone can simply copy you exactly, they can completely undercut you and basically put you out of business. A bit different than the software world.
> And due to licensing of OSS, it may be a bad thing for a company to build their multi-billion dollar business on something they need to open source for someone to immediately knock them off and kill their business.
Nobody, other than a company that makes only CPUs or CPU IP, adds value in the CPU. If you're anybody else, a CPU is a commodity dingus that you need to run your software, which is where the interesting things for your billion dollar business go on.
If you are a large user of CPUs, or even CPU IP, there's only so much you're going to pay before you band together with other large users and cut out the person collecting the payments. The freedom to make small tweaks may also be a a nice extra for a very few users. Maybe you need a special functional unit to speed something up. But your core value is not going to be in those tweaks, and in fact you save money if you can upstream them and get somebody else to do some or all of the maintenance.
That's what happened with the operating system layer. Nobody worries that they're "building their business" on the Linux kernel.
The CPU/GPU/Memory SoC in a Mac is a line item, albeit a hefty line. The one in an iPhone is more so. They sell systems as their product, not retail box processors. It's thought an M1 cost them around $50 in a $2000 laptop.
Well, I think we're of two valid points of view on this one. You're saying Apple adds value to the CPU itself, which taken abstractly is true since they do have some advancements in the CPU and how they package it in the SoC. I'm saying that concretely they and their customers tend to consider it value added to the finished system, especially since you can't just go out and buy an M1Max or an M2 for your own system with a board from elsewhere. Lots of their design and engineering is in the SoC rather than the CPU proper, too, with how it's integrated with the GPU, the memory, and the storage controller.
So in the really broad statement that only companies that make just the CPU or CPU IP add value to it, I'd consider Apple more of an edge case than an outright exception. Of course Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVidia, and AMD don't build and sell only CPUs either. They make, among them, storage, RAM, display panels, GPUs, chipsets, radio baseboards, TVs, whole computers, etc. I think the point is best worded that they sell the CPUs as a retail or OEM part rather than as part of a larger system of their own. That's debatable, too, but I'm not sure Apple is a perfect counterexample to the point as I described above.
> I wonder if it's because Apple captures so much margin from the final product which means they can afford to spend top dollar on CPU design teams?
That's an excellent question. If I could answer it completely and definitively I'd probably be making my living as an industry analyst for some magazine or investment fund. I have a suspicion that might be right, though.
Apple and Google today, and sometimes other companies, are starting to remind me of AT&T before the divestiture. They're such big, profitable players that they can have huge skunkworks attacking adjacent problems to their core business and keep doing so in new directions.
> True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced.
That turns out not to be the case.
Alibaba's C910 core -- roughly comparable to the ARM A72 cores (at the same MHz) in the Pi 4 -- is open sourced. It is being used, at 2.5 GHz, in the upcoming "Roma" laptop. That is rather expensive (for now), but I suspect the same TH1520 SoC will quickly find its way onto cheaper SBCs.
There is a very wide OoO GPL'd RISC-V core that is under development. It is aiming for eventual Apple M1 level performance. The current iteration is falling short of that at the moment, but it's already comparable to the ARM A76 in the latest RK3588 SBCs: https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom
But instead of one ISA vendor who holds all the card, there will be dozens of them, lowering prices and probably with more freedom in modifying the designs.
What you are saying isn't wrong. But I'd like to point out is that the companies that buy "Chinese RISC-V MCUs" may not be the same ones who license Arm CPU IPs and put them next to logic from other suppliers on a custom built chip.
For one thing, it is seen as risky nowadays to use Chinese IP in chips, ever since Mr. Trump said that the US government wouldn't buy certain Chinese tech.
The bigger cost in chip development is verification, not design. If you use open-source IP, I assume you need to take on this burden yourself or pay someone else to do it. The cost for doing that may well be more than the cost to license an already verified core (Arm or RISC-V ISA).
Secondly, there are numerous open-source RISC-V designs out there to give any company a head start and the freedom to modify it as they see fit.