I believe if RISC-V takes off then most of the popular commercial RISC-V implementations will come from existing chip companies. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, NXP, TI, Samsung, MediaTek and a bunch in China. Of course, the performance of those companies probably won't depend on if they're on RISC-V or Arm.
Newer, smaller RISC-V first chip companies will only be able to fill niche markets and customer specific applications because they simply won't have the scale or customer base to compete with the giant chip companies.
Will we see a large market for laptops and workstations on RISC-V? Probably not.
But one of the interesting things about RISC-V is you can build extensions on the standard ISA so custom implementations can get application specific hardware additions while still leveraging pretty much the entire open source software stack for development toolchains and general purpose compute. With Arm, you were pretty much limited to what they provided unless you are huge customer like Apple were you had the leverage to negotiate you're own technology and IP agreements.
I don't think RISC-V is a big threat to Arm though. They can also provide their own RISC-V solutions if they felt like they needed to retain customers.
So maybe there's an opportunity for Arm-like, fabless, deisgn services companies that sell custom RISC-V based solutions for their customers. The only companies I know of like that are Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens.
