The Raspberry Pi Foundation's offices are in Cambridge where ARM is and there are ex Broadcom engineers (I think?) working there so just culturally I can see why ARM is a natural connection. I think this "lets make everything RISCV" meme (like "lets rewrite everything in rust") is going to get a cold evaluation as it doesn't originate there and the cold evalution will be that ARM is a big stable player that isn't going to disappear suddenly or radically change focus, that the cost of its licenses isn't material to RPi and that RPi's success is not endangered by sticking with ARM ... as things stand today.
RP1 and software support are their strengths and I think they won't take risks with instruction set changes or even the vendor of their particular ARM chip.
So I think this strategic investment is probably equivalent to a marketing cost - it won't stop RPi doing RISCV because they wouldn't do it anyhow. It will just help Rpi reach more people.
RP1 and software support are their strengths and I think they won't take risks with instruction set changes or even the vendor of their particular ARM chip.
So I think this strategic investment is probably equivalent to a marketing cost - it won't stop RPi doing RISCV because they wouldn't do it anyhow. It will just help Rpi reach more people.