Dave Ditzel, who is no dummy saw RISC-V as the better choice for the machine learning accelerator Esperanto Technologies is building: https://www.eejournal.com/article/another-risc-v-religious-c...

There are numerous research articles and examples online of companies deciding on RISC-V and their reasons for it.

Unless I misunderstand I cannot see how OpenPower matches RISC-V at all. It is a large ISA, which means you don't have the option of making e.g. small specialized co-processors based on the ISA. Nor can you make simple CPUs for the microcontroller market.

The RISC-V BOOM has half the silicon area requirement of a comparable ARM Cortex CPU, is OpenPower based chips able to match that?

If you already have a large instruction-set I don't quite see the value in an extendable ISA. You cannot keep the ISA lean as micro-architecture best practices change.

RISC-V has commoditized the cpu.

It doesn't need to be orders of magnitude better. Even if it is at par or even marginally worse, people will start using it.

general purpose embedded processor

All the example you sight are in embedded controller, where the author has been consistently comparing RSIC-V to General Purpose CPU ISA like x86 and ARMv8 / aarch64.

>The RISC-V BOOM has half the silicon area requirement of a comparable ARM Cortex CPU, is OpenPower based chips able to match that?

I did include the microWatts link in the post above.

But your argument doesn't really make any sense as ARM is a frequent choice for this kind of things. In fact is one of the main competing CPUs considered by Nvidia. ARM is widely used in embedded system. That it became a desktop CPU is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Esperanto Technologies use RISC-V both for general purpose processor and specialized coprocessors.

Anyway the whole point of RISC-V is to be able to span from small embedded systems to super computers.

> I did include the microWatts link in the post above.

I cannot find any quote on number of transistors it uses or comparison to other designs. Given that it is supposed to implement the IBM POWER ISA v3.0 which is quite huge I don't see how you can get the transistor count below that of RISC-V while still having decent performance.

> This is probably a more faithful representation of what happens in the x86 code as well. I doubt you can multiply with anything but multiples of 2, since multiplication is a fairly complex operation.

For an article comparing instruction sets, ‘I dunno and didn't care enough to spend 30 seconds Googling’ does not inspire confidence.

I don’t think “the general public” even knows what “RISC-V” means. It’s more some specific circles where this is going on.

The good thing for those writing such articles is that it’s hard to refute them, as they only discuss the instruction set, not particular designs, and few, if any, people can meaningfully judge how true various claims “this thing my/your favorite CPU does is worth/not worth the transistors. You’ll see it once advanced designs of my favorite CPU exist” are (even more so because feature A may be worth it for a CPU that also does B, but doesn’t do C, and that has a given power budget)