A question was asked at this year's DEF CON during the "Making The DEF CON 32 Badge" talk. Luke Wren responded by saying he couldn't compare size of the ARM and RISC-V cores, but said that taking them out wouldn't make the chip die smaller. He added that he knew exactly what shape hole the core was going to fit into, and designed it to fit.

I didnt attend this year but was super impressed at how DEF CON and Raspberry Pi worked together on this years badge + announced the release of RP2350 on the same day DC32 started!

I immediately put an order in for one and should get it pretty soon.

> how DEF CON and Raspberry Pi worked together on this years badge

rPi donated the chips, Entropic Engineering designed the boards, I wrote the firmware. DEFCON made the gameboy game the badge runs and designed the plastics.

I wonder if ARM told them not to say. Seems like an obvious question to ask and it wouldn't take that much work to get a ballpark answer.

ARM puts the number on their website. For a 40nm node, it's 0.028mm^2. That is configuration dependent, but it's a starting point.