ljhsiung

This is true, but only for the bigger players. The nature of hardware still fundamentally favors scale and centralization. Every hyper-scalar eventually gets to a size that developing in-house CPU talent is just straight up better (Qcom and Ventana + Nuvia, Meta and Rivos, Google's been building their own team, Nvidia and Vera-Rubin, God help Microsoft though). This does not bode well for RISC-V companies, who are just being used as a stepping stone. See Anthropic, who does currently license but is rumored to develop their own in-house talent [1].

> Extensibility powers technology innovation

>> While this flexibility could cause problems for the software ecosystem...

"While" is doing some incredible heavy lifting. It is not enough to be able to run Ubuntu, as may be sufficient for embedded applications, but to also be fast. Thusly, there are many hardcoded software optimizations just for a CPU, let alone ARM or x86. For RISC-V? Good luck coding up every permutation of an extension that exists, and even if it's lumped as RVA23, good luck parsing through 100 different "performance optimization manuals" from 100 different companies.

> How mature is the software ecosystem?

10 years ago, when RISC-V was invented, the founders said 20 years. 10 years later, I say 30 years.

The nature of hardware as well, is that the competition (ARM) is not stationary as well. The reason for ARM's dominance now is the failure of Intel, and the strong-arming of Apple.

I have worked in and on RISC-V chips for a number of years, and while I am still a believer that it is the theoretical end state, my estimates just feel like they're getting longer and longer.

Lip Bu Tan, for instance, has performance targets on a five year timeline, which are all negated if the stock falls below a certain threshhold in 3 years. [1]

Or, ever controversial Elon Musk, certainly has an (also egregious) $1 Trillion dollar pay package, but it has some pretty extreme goals over 10 years, such as shipping 1 million Optimus robots [2].

All in all, we can debate about the Goodharting of these metrics (as Musk is keen to do), but I feel boards of these public companies are trying to make more long-term plans, or at least moving away from tying goals to pure quarterly metrics. Perhaps we can argue about the execution of them.

Note: I own neither of these stocks and my only vested interest is buying the S&P.

This makes some intuitive sense to me. Money provides freedom, but freedom is not happiness. It's freedom to explore, which is quite scary in and of itself. But if your mindset is proper, your creativity and appetite for exploration will be unbounded.

1.6 Bil in 1969 dollars translates to 13.6 Bil in 2024 dollars.

Oftentimes I hear complaints that today's projects cost too much, or I come across ballot measures where the other side is always like "something something we have no moneys" such as Prop 4 in California [1]. Sometimes reading about the past puts the present in perspective.