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Maybe in a decade or so it may be more relevant but not today. Calling this a "fundamental threat" is a tad exaggerated.
And a realistic estimate how long it will take to develop something that would be on par with today's Snapdragon, Exynos or Apple's chips is at least those 10 years. You need quite a bit more to have a high performance processor than just the instruction set.
The "just worked" chips are microcontrollers, something you may want to put in your toaster or fridge but not a SoC at the level of e.g. Snapdragon 835 (which is an old design, at that).
Also the Sipeed chips are mostly just unoptimized reference designs, they have a fairly poor performance.
Most people who talk and hype RISC-V don't realize this.
Alibaba recently said their XT910 was slightly faster than the A73. Since the first actual A73 launched in Q4 2016, that would imply they are at most 4 years behind.
SiFive's U8 design from last year claimed to have the same performance as A72 with 50% greater performance per watt and using half the die area. Consider how popular the Raspberry PI is with it's A72 cores. With those RISCV cores, they could drastically increase the cache size and even potentially add more PCIe lanes within the same die size and power limits.
Finding out new things takes much more time than re-implementing what is known to already work. As with other things, the 80/20 rule applies. ARM has caught up a few orders of magnitude in the past decade. RISCV can easily do the same and give the lack of royalties. Meanwhile, the collaboration helps to share costs and discoveries which might mean progress will be even faster.
I'm not saying Apple can drop-in RISC-V front-end to their silicon and call it a day, but you get the idea.
Sifive has a pretty decent chance at making performant chips within next few years.
RISC-V in high performance computing is years out even if big players like Samsung or Qualcomm decided to switch today. New silicon takes time to develop.
And Nvidia really couldn't care less about the $1-$10 RISC-V microcontrollers that companies like SiPeed or Gigadevice are churning out today (and even there ARM micros are outselling these by several orders of magnitude).
> A 25% gain over a horizon of four years is not bad for your average investment -- but this isn't an average investment.
> First, compared to the SP500, this underperforms over the same horizon (even compared to end of 2019 rather than the inflated prices right now).
> Second, ARM's sector (semiconductors) has performed far, far better in that time. The PHOX (Philadelphia Semiconductor Index) doubled in the same time period.
> And looking at AMD and NVIDIA, it feels as if ARM would have been in a position to benefit from the surrounding euphoria.
That's the "valuation drops" - relatively to the market, ARM has significantly underperformed, despite the business being actually healthy and on the rise.
