RISC-V is pretty nice in that the ISA gets out of your way, and you can focus on the techniques to build a high-performance processor without wasting effort on

RISC-V is pretty nice in that the ISA gets out of your way, and you can focus on the techniques to build a high-performance processor without wasting effort on legacy and other weird corner case behaviors. A++, would recommend. However, if you want to build really high performance cores, there are plenty of challenging techniques you have to employ that add a lot of complexity that is hidden below the ISA abstraction layer (speculation for example). So if you want to make RISC-V go fast, you have to employ more design tricks like "macro-op fusion". For example, scan for two load instructions in the fetch stream and fuse them into a single "load-pair" micro-op if they access adjacent addresses. There are a whole bag of tricks like this that are irrespective of the ISA and add a fairly high "skill-ceiling" to processor design.