It was always thought that, when ARM relinquished its independence, its customers would look around for other alternatives.

The nice thing about RISC-V is that it’s independent, open source and royalty-free.

And RISC-V is what Samsung is reported to be using for an IoT CPU in preference to ARM.

Now SoftBank made a point of saying that its take-over of ARM was to get into IoT. If Samsung is now going to RISC-V for its IoT CPU, this affects the scale of Softbank’s aspirations and may persuade others to defect to RISC-V.

The Samsung RISC-V MCU is said to be aimed squarely at the ARM Cortex M0.

Nvidia and Qualcomm are already using RISC-V in the development of GPU memory controllers and IoT processors.

Although, as Intel found, it’s almost impossible to replace an incumbent processor architecture in a major product area, which means that ARM’s place as the incumbent architecture in cellphones is secure, at the moment there is no incumbent processor architecture in IoT or MCU – so these are up for grabs by any aspiring rival processor architecture.