The problem is that you can't have open-source chips without an open-source ISA. Without an open-source ISA we can't have a open-hardware movement for silicon.

The problem is that you can't have open-source chips without an open-source ISA. Without an open-source ISA we can't have a open-hardware movement for silicon. Yes, the internal design is the important part, and having an ISA that is designed properly, will make that a lot easier and we have seen both high and low performance chips that can compete with ARM speeds while having far less development time. RISC-V is designed to allow individual companies to add their own secret sauce and to have a tool-chain that makes that easy. We should remember that RISC-V is still incredible young, it only just escaped officially from university 3 years ago.