alt Hacker NewsYeah, they could but then what is the market? Qualcomm wants to sell smartphone chips and Android can run on RISC-V and most Android Java apps could in theory run.
But if you look at the Intel x86 smartphone chips from about 10 years ago they had to make an ARM to x86 emulator because even the Java apps contained native ARM instructions for performance reasons.
Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.
Nvidia could also make RISC-V based chips but where would they go? Nvidia is moving further away from the consumer space to the data center space. So even if Nvidia made a really fast RISC-V CPU it would probably be for the server / data center market and they may not even sell it to ordinary consumers.
Or if they did it could be like the Ampere ARM chips for servers. Yeah you can buy one as an ordinary consumer but they were in the $4,000 range last time I looked. How many people are going to buy that?
> Qualcomm is trying to push their ARM Snapdragon chips in Windows laptops but I don't think they are selling well.
That definitely seems to be the case. I think they likely would have more luck with Riscv phones (much less app brand loyalty). or servers (arm in the server has done a lot better than on windows)
For Nvidia, if they made a consumer riscv cpu it would be a gaming handheld/console (Switch 3 or similar) once the AI bubble pops. Before that, likely would be server cpus that cost $10k for big AI systems. Before that, I could see them expanding the role of Riscv in their GPUs (likely not visible to to users).