>> There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this.

Yeah I agree, but the list of giant companies involved in the wishing is what makes it seem like more than a pipe dream. Just think how much revenue ARM will lose when WD, nVidia, Samsung and others all switch to RISC-V in their embedded devices.

Why is it any more fringe than, say, hoping for an ARM laptop?

ARM laptops already exist BTW using smartphone SoCs. The R&D has already been done and paid for.

A RISC-V server or desktop processor would have to be created essentially from scratch.

>> A RISC-V server or desktop processor would have to be created essentially from scratch.

I'd love to see AMD or Intel build a chip on the RISC-V instruction set and use all their existing infrastructure around that. I would not be surprised it they could achieve higher benchmark performance than their x86 offerings. For someone else to achieve the same level of performance will take a while, but there are multiple groups working on it.

Because ARM laptops have been shipping for years, while there isn't even a single RISC-V SoC out there that could even hypothetically be used in a laptop.

There are a few ARM based Chromebooks. In many cases, it isn't too hard to put regular Linux on them.