All the attention from RISC-V comes down to the fact that the creators like to trash talk proprietary ISAs like x86 and ARM and they like to put RISC-V under the banner of being "new and clean". This leads the average joe (and by "average joe" I mean software engineers without any background in hardware or in CPU architecture) to dream of a "Linux of CPUs", thinking they could hack something overnight and magically have a working open hardware, even though the CPU is just a small part of the entire system.

At the academia level, RISC-V is a very good thing since it allows to research new kinds of architecture without being bound by proprietary ISAs. But at the industrial level, it's just hype.

Wrong. I believe most people here are focused on high performance implementation (servers, desktops, laptops) and Risc V won't get there for a long time, if at all. High performance needs very high investment, to work closely to the fabs to tweak a design to make the most of new process nodes. Only big players can afford this. So if you have only this in mind, yes Risc V may sound like hype.

But there's a huge domain of embedded designs, with small scale CPU where the cost matters a lot. There are many niche players there, like Cortus, Andes, BA Semin and now SiFive. ARM is also there with Cortex M, but it's expensive and the line-up has holes (big gap between M and A/R series). Yes, ARM is expensive at the low end. ARM is cheap at the high end, when compared to Intel. Not at the low end. So far all these players have suffered from a limited ecosystem. With dedicated ISAs, each one had to support their toolchain with limited resources, and limited 3rd party support. What Risc V offers to them is the ability to leverage a significant ecosystem. They can focus on the CPU core implementation, with value added customization (extra instructions, accelerators, ...) and support, and leverage all the tooling around Risc V with much little effort. This makes a big difference. And all of them are moving to Risc V, it's their future. As a user, it does make a big difference to me. Instead of a lagging GCC toolchain, I'll soon have access to recent GCC and LLVM based tools for example.

For IoT in general, Risc V offers the possibility to have an open system, which in the end means more competition and lower costs, with no lock-in from some big actors "owning" the ISA you're using. A lot of people are looking at this seriously.

So no, Risc V is not hype. And there's already industrial changes. You just need to look at the deeply embedded world.