>> What is the incentive for big giants like Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia to adopt RISC-V? Isn't their moat their in-house chips?
Every chip company other than Intel and AMD licenses designs or ISA from ARM. Risc-V has no licensing fees if you design your own, and there are even free designs out there.
It's not feasible to create your own instruction set. You also have to build a whole bunch of software infrastructure for it and convince people to use it and port apps to it. Intel doesn't license x86. ARM costs money, and RISC-V is an open standard that was competently designed by some very smart people. It is also the 3rd most well supported ISA from a software point of view.
It is feasible to have your own instruction set. Many companies have done it, its just a pretty bad idea and everybody that has done it wants to stop doing it.
Every chip company other than Intel and AMD licenses designs or ISA from ARM. Risc-V has no licensing fees if you design your own, and there are even free designs out there.
It's not feasible to create your own instruction set. You also have to build a whole bunch of software infrastructure for it and convince people to use it and port apps to it. Intel doesn't license x86. ARM costs money, and RISC-V is an open standard that was competently designed by some very smart people. It is also the 3rd most well supported ISA from a software point of view.