I am cautiously optimistic about the future of RISC-V. It is likely to start biting at the heals of ARM in another 5 years or so, and having no licensing fees makes it very attractive in that sense. Qualcomm and Apple will be very interesting in avoiding as many ARM licensing fees as possible even if initially in embedded systems. But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM and so it might not be so great for the end users. Time will tell.

All I know is that I look for the seeing Apple Silicon 2 launching in 2036 using this stuff. ;)

Go!

This is mostly because their approach to SIMD is so different, but also because I can't test it at all. Are there any RISC-V "machines"? that one can use to do something useful or fun with that someone here could recommend?

I guess it would be fun seeing all my SIMD-fiable use-cases become orders of magnitude faster on RISC-V, too, but I sadly never hear anything about machines that use RISC-V.

> Addressing concerns that creating a new base ISA might fracture the open-source community, Asanović offered a devoted defense to EE Times. “CHERI is too invasive to be a simple extension on regular RISC-V, and so needs a new base ISA for that reason,”

To me it sounds like they're creating RISC-VI before RISC-V even winning the market.