Closed cores and encumbered instruction sets are a thing of the past. CPUs and instruction sets are close to being commodity. One can already roll performant g

Closed cores and encumbered instruction sets are a thing of the past. CPUs and instruction sets are close to being commodity. One can already roll performant general systems with FPGAs. As FPGAs get more logic blocks that are amenable to building higher clock rate soft CPUs the general purpose CPU will be out. If someone is going to have a full stack hardware class, why not use an un-encumbered soft CPU, specifically RISC-V, of which there are multiple high quality implementations in a variety of languages.