RISC-V: Did Apple Make the Wrong Choice?

Apple’s M1 chip is based on ARM. But what if the open source RISC-V instruction-set proves superior to ARM?

A board with a RISC-V based microprocessor: SiFive RISC-V HiFive

RISC-V is a competing microprocessor design. Or to be more precise it is a competing instruction set architecture (ISA). Some speculate that Apple may have made the wrong choice and that RISC-V is the future. Again to quote my sparring partner Sergiy Yevtushenko:

Worse (for Apple) is that wider acceptance of ARM for desktop opens the door to other non-x86 architectures as well. For example RISC-V recently started gaining attention. Unlike ARM it’s completely open source architecture which doesn’t need to be even licensed. And it has even lower power consumption per MHz than ARM, so high performance chips are much easier to design and use.

In fact this would be quite exciting in my humble opinion. RISC-V is a very interesting design which I would love to see more success from. However I will question the assumption that RISC-V somehow spells doom for Apple. Quite the contrary. Let me elaborate:

Apple has made more major hardware and operating system transitions than any other company in the computer industry:

1. From Apple II to the first Mac in 1984. They successfully changed to an entirely different…