Remember AMD's Skybridge project? They wanted to put ARM and x86 together on one chip, but they cancelled it. I don't know why, because it seemed like a cool way to bridge the gap. Maybe they were worried it'd become a reverse trojan horse like the Apple Macintosh clones that came about shortly before Steve returned in the 90s.<p>Seeing as Raspberry Pi has no dog in the game, and simply wants to offer the best product possible, I wouldn't be surprised if this is their intentional way of giving people RISC-V with the intent to allow them time to port their code to it so they can eventually pull the ARM stack. I say this because Jeff Geerling has a video about the Pico 2 where he explicitly says you can only use RISC-V or ARM cores. Not both sets at the same time.<p>I think it's probably because a full migration to RISC-V would allow them to innovate a bit more and cut prices, although I don't know what the restrictions really are with ARM's IP control and pricing. At $5, every penny counts though.