If only ISAs weren't protected (or protectable) by patents.

I wonder how many of the obvious design shortcomings in RISC-V are from IPR avoidance / making IPR problematic parts optional.

What I like about RISC-V is not the ISA per se, but the ecosystem that has developed around it, particularly Chisel and CIRCT.

Specific choices for instruction encoding is less interesting, especially in the age of AI.

Things are generally defined by the neccessities that led to their creation. x86 was designed for home PCs and has been forced to evolve with PC technology. ARM was designed to take advantage of RISC architecture, and were forced to evolve with the mobile industry. What was RISC-V invented for, and what external forces have acted on it since then?

Ah rants from a non designer. So Patterson and crew, don't know what they are doing? Yeah hard pass.

What happened to the Rivos accelerator cores?

  > fired half of them

It's clear that RISC-V started as an academic exercise (albeit from a group with esteemed credentials) and they had to bolt on these hacks to make it work in industry.

Sad.

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