I think it could go either way. I get where you're coming from, but think it's equally likely that it'll go in the opposite direction. The underlying economic reasons behind why the internals of these chips aren't publicly exposed have a good chance of being exasperated by the in progress democratization of fabless chip design. More chips will be designed to fill a specific niche and not be publicly documented; that's because public documentation is a huge schlep that's not work towards their niche or value add. Yeah there'll be more RISC-V but most cores today are something supported by GCC as it is; that's not the impediment to understanding the chip, but instead everything custom around the CPU core is. And the openness of RISC-V could lead to fragmentation (but we have yet to see that, and I'll admit that's mainly an ARM propaganda talking point at the moment).
Good points. They’re entitled to their research and development not being cloned. I think that fracturing is likely with RISC-V in the short term but a natural hegemony will form under some protocols, hopefully they don’t suck and can scale.
