> anybody can’t build a RISC-V chip
Yes, they can. My point is that nobody needs to give you permission. You can pretend that does not matter but China is about to educate us about what this means rather dramatically in the next few years.
And India is building RISC-V chips. And Europe is building RISC-V chips. Tenstorrent started in Canada (building RISC-V chips).
> the number who can get or own a FAB to manufacture the chips
Really? Almost nobody owns fabs and yet there are a multitude of chip makers. Getting access to a fab requires only money. It has nothing to do with the ISA or your skills. TSMC can make RISC-V chips just fine and already do. In some places, like China, RISC-V chips may be at the front of the line.
> The number of people who can design a chip implementation of the RISC-V ISA
Anybody can build a RISC-V chip. Build one yourself:
https://github.com/tscheipel/HaDes-V
Every electrical engineer is going to know how to design a RISC-V chip. But you could also be an intelligent garbage man and design a RISC-V chip in your spare time using only open source materials. You can even tape it out.
https://tinytapeout.com/
"But that is only a 32 bit microcontroller!", you might say. Sure. But the skills to build RISC-V are going to propogate. Of course, that does not mean that everybody in the world is going to figure out how to build chips. That is clearly not my point. They will still be built primarily by a select few. But that is not unique to RISC-V by any stretch. In fact, less so.
The hard part about building a chip from scratch is not the ISA. You think that a world-class engineer working with ARM64 or amd64 today cannot design a RISC-V chip? That is like saying a carpenter building oak cabinets lacks the skills to make them with maple.
And since it is the same amount of work to start fresh regardless of ISA, why not start with RISC-V?
Except you do not have to start fresh with RISC-V because there are many, and will be many, many more, open designs to study and start with. Here is a 64 bit chip that implements the very latest RISC-V vector extensions:
https://github.com/tenstorrent/riscv-ocelot
Which, by the way, means that although most won't, anybody can build a RISC-V chip.
The RISC-V world will look like ARM. Most chip makers will license the core design off somebody else. But there will be more of those "somebody elses" to choose from. And there will be more people who choose to design their own silicon. Meta just bought Rivos. What for do you think? And they did not have to talk to ARM about it.
