If you're an academic doing research into new techniques for branch prediction or some other topic it can be very useful to have well tested designs as a starti

If you're an academic doing research into new techniques for branch prediction or some other topic it can be very useful to have well tested designs as a starting point you can modify to try out your idea which are starting from a very basic place. It isn't architecturally innovative, isn't meant to be, and isn't a good place to start if you're thinking about doing architectural innovation. A lot of people are talking up RISC-V like it'll solve every problem but there are many problems in both academia and the real world where it represents a solution.