Now I know that doesn't sound like much. Don't kid yourself into thinking Apple Silicon M1 and M2 came from nowhere, though. If it wasn't for growing capability in the ARM lines in other products Apple would not have been so likely to invest in it for their new technology, Rosetta or no. Exynos Chromebooks and such led the way to ARM Macbooks the same way the IBM PC led to displacing DEC and Sun workstations, then minicomputers, then x86 servers replacing most other servers in the DC.
I think chrome books had very little to do with it. A lot of the work had already happened with the PowerPC switch. On the processor front, Apple’s arm processors aren’t at all like exynos chips that use standard arm cores. I would say that the apple silicon macs are more influenced by iPhone and iPad success than anything else, especially since iOS already runs a lot of macOS
There's a whole world of ARM processors out there. The ISA, packaging, software, and expertise around it everywhere in the world helps make that ecosystem stronger. Before ARM there was Intel, and before Intel was PowerPC, yet even before that there were the 68000 series Macs. And before the Mac, there were the 65816 in the IIgs and the 6502 in the Apple II. Don't be surprised if Apple is an early adopter of RISC-V for support processors. If they decide they've made them performant enough after a few years of that, don't be surprised if they use them as CPUs and stop needing to license cores and ISAs from ARM at all.
But I can promise you one thing. Apple didn't look at the 18 MHz v7 cores from Cirrus Logic in the Psion Series 5 and immediately decide they could make a mainstream desktop CPU out of it. The competition of companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Broadcom in consumer electronics has a lot to do with how ARM cores became suitable for Macbook.
I can definitely see that hobbyist market and future Pi-like devices moving to RISC-V, but I'm less certain about mainstream use unless Windows and Mac (or maybe even Android and ChromeOS) really decide to move over.
And I know of 3 families that have pi based desktops at home, and use them as desktops. (One of those has a person that works in IT in it.) I don't know anybody that has "experimental desktops" that they use only to thinker with, AFAIK, when people assembly a desktop, it's because they want to use as a desktop.
But I think more importantly, there will be no demand until someone makes a RISC-V CPU that can actually compete with Intel, AMD and Apple on performance.
$100 Laptops, $70 phones and $50 tablets will be a big target for RISC-V.
If RISC-V doesn't see the development for upmarket products it's not going to magically take over the downmarket segments. No one footing the development bill is going to selling $50 tablets.
But over ten or fifteen years? Very possibly. And if not porting apps directly to RISC-V, then porting them to WASM and letting browser vendors optimize WASM performance on RISC-V.
One thing that RISC-V enables is open source hardware CPUs. There are quite a few people who're upset by stuff like the Intel Management Engine IME making them distrust their personal computer.
These folks don't really have any options that fit their criteria right now.
Some RISC-V CPU could fit in there.
