That RISC-V stuff looks pretty appealing - I'm looking the Freedom E310 now and one thing I'm sort of confused by.
Is only the architecture open, but the silicon isn't? If so, what's the point of that, is the only thing differentiating it from ARM that there's no licensing fee?
If so, are there any ARM SoC vendors making them in a way that they're relatively free from stuff like Intel ME?
Sorry for the late response! (was out of the country)
RISC-V is a free and open instruction set architecture (ISA). People can go ahead and build open-source implementations, closed-source implementations, licensed implementations. This is very different than ARM, where you can only buy implementations from ARM, or if you happen to be one of a handful of selected companies with an ARM architectural license (which costs $$$$$), you can build your own implementation, but they still have to meet certain specifications as dictated by ARM. People can freely implement RISC-V processors, extend them, and play around with it. We think RISC-V has a big potential to unleash innovation. As a matter of fact, we believe this is the prerequisite.
SiFive has made the RTL open-sourced that went into FE310. We think this is a big deal, because other SoCs don't open-source their RTL.
Is only the architecture open, but the silicon isn't? If so, what's the point of that, is the only thing differentiating it from ARM that there's no licensing fee?
If so, are there any ARM SoC vendors making them in a way that they're relatively free from stuff like Intel ME?