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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I am hoping that "Android for RISC-V" is more successful than "Android for x86" which was a completely unmitigated disaster (yes I still have a Lenovo x86 Android tablet :-)) Reading this though doesn't really give me a lot of confidence though. High hopes, low expectations.

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The market will unavoidably be flooded with cheap consumer devices carrying RISC-V implementations as their main processors.

I'd be more concerned about ARM support stagnating.

just because the ISA is free doesn't mean the chips will become supper cheap

RISK-V is currently not really that competitive on the lower end marked as there are just too cheap ARM chips

but it is e.g. very competitive for companies needing large quantities of simple but slightly customized chips where existing cheap ARM chips aren't an option and customized arm chips are too expensive

and there are currently no competitive RISK-V chips in the high end marked

it can somewhat compete on the mid marked, if it wouldn't be for too low quantities driving the price up

it also could be interesting if e.g. Intel or AMD decides to enter the non x86 market as they could cut out license cost to ARM

but all in all I wouldn't be worried about ARM support being reduced in the ecosystem for many many years to come

Chromebooks are mostly x86 now. They run android apps. Also android emulator (not everyone is a rich american with arm macbooks).

A constant problem on the Lenovo machines was that there was no byte order preserving when it came to data and as a result stored "state" would often blow up apps as it came back in the wrong byte order.

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