> The most notable one I can think of is that integer multiplication is not in core. And? Base RISC-V is meant to be as simple as possible; if you're designing

> The most notable one I can think of is that integer multiplication is not in core. And? Base RISC-V is meant to be as simple as possible; if you're designing an ultra-low power microcontroller you probably don't want a hardware multiplier, and you shouldn't be forced to have one. The "G" general purpose set of extensions is what you need for an application processor. Something like RV64GC would be what most compiler writers would be targetting. > telling me that the spec authors think that multiplication and division are of the same circuit complexity Given the profiles of the spec authors I highly doubt this is the case; the number of modern cores which support hardware multiplication but not division is very small. > Anybody that's written a compiler or even stared at assembly would tell you how prevalent integer multiplication is, for any sort of loop or pointer addressing. For a loop you'll probably try to avoid as much multiplication as possible by transforming the induction variable to make it amenable to strength reduction.