Western Digital is using it on their hdd controllers. SiFive licenses IP for big cores and China apparently plans to work with it in the future.

Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback. Programs like EAC and dbpoweramp support it. I use it for my music collection on my phone, at half the size of mp3 it sounds completely transparent to me with my earbuds.

>Also I don't know why you count Ogg Vorbis as a fantasy kind of thing, it's used for pretty much any conference app and it has support on most consumer hardware and softwware for playback.

The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't. That players support it is also not a mark of great success, since most people don't and won't care to use it. It just means that for the rare person caring enough, it will work.

From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference.

>The idea in the day was it would replace mp3/aac/etc which it obviously didn't.

It did for anyone that cares about it and about file size. My portable library is vorbis. Mp3 is just very popular and there are a lot of mp3 files out there that can't be converted without further degradation of the sound quality so mp3 will remain relevant for a long time.

>From that aspect, the fact that conference apps use it as the internal format is hardly relevant, they could license and use whatever and we wouldn't know any difference.

It's relevant in terms of market support. Vorbis isn't going anywhere. The random codecs that have popped over the years, open or proprietary never got a lot of support from other companies so they went away.

Basically as much as PIC and similar chipsets, just without the tooling ecosystem.

There's been some real uptake for large consumers of embedded cores who can use it to avoid paying ARM royalties and to be able to add their own custom instructions for their specific workloads.

And in teaching. If you're going to get a sophomore to build their first 3 stage RISC pipeline or a senior their first OoO machine with register renaming then RISC-V's consistent design removes a lot of unnecessary distractions.

I assume people are using it in research too. If I were to redo my thesis on improving adder efficiency today I'd probably look at using an open source RISC-V design as a base.

I'm skeptical of RISC-V's ability to succeed as an application core like ARM's A series or modern x86. But none the less I'm bullish on it having an important future.

Ogg Vorbis is actually very relevant. I remember a lot of games used Ogg Vorbis for audio files.

Some mainstream software packages are still work in progress, for example V8 doesn't target it yet.

But RISC-V is thriving in other areas like industrial controllers, and Alibaba Cloud just announced a few days ago they are using it in a new server processor, positioned as an eventual competitor to AWS Graviton.

Topically: Nvidia uses RISC-V in some GPUs as a controller (not the GPU core). Not sure if those are released yet, but they gave a presentation on it at a recent RISC-V meet-up.

It is more of a fantasy thing, nothing loosing sleep over, besides some early C and C++ support via GCC, there are almost no mature toolchains to chose from.

And there are only some Linux special variants for it.