alt Hacker NewsI wouldn't bet against software inertia.
x86 only missed the mobile market because of multiple bad business decisions, otherwise ARM (and RISC architectures overall) would have been relegated to more decades as backwater architectures.
There is nothing inevitable about anything as Apple controls its own silicon very tightly, Microsoft hasn't even really transitioned away from x86, and Android probably isn't very keen to transition away from ARM.
Now, embedded markets are different but they've always been different and the number of embedded programmers is dwarfed by non embedded programmers and regular users will for a long time never install an app on RISC-V.
It's an interesting journey, let's see where it takes us in 20 years.
Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.