Isn’t there some dynamic at play where STM will put one of these on a board, that board becomes a “standard” and then it’s cloned by other manufacturers, lowering cost? (legality aside)
Some chips that have come out in the past 3 years with Cortex A7:
Microchip SAMA7D65 and SAMA7G54. Allwinner V853 and T113-S3.
It's not like a massive stream of A7's. But even pretty big players don't really seem to have any competitive options to try. The A-35 has some adoption. There is an A34 and A32 that I don't see much of, don't know what they'd bring above the A7. All over a decade old now and barely seen.
To be fair, just this year ARM announced Cortex-A320 which I don't know much about, but might perhaps be a viable new low power chip.
STM32H5 in 2023 (M33): https://newsroom.st.com/media-center/press-item.html/p4519.h...
GD32F5 in 2024: https://www.gigadevice.com/about/news-and-event/news/gigadev...
STM32N6 in 2025 (M55): https://blog.st.com/stm32n6/
i.e. it takes some time for new chips to hit cost targets, and most applications don’t need the latest chips?
I don’t know a lot about the market, though, and interested to learn more