It is sometimes said of the 21st century that it is an era of customization. If we take that notion as the gospel truth, there is no part of the computing stac

It is sometimes said of the 21st century that it is an era of customization. If we take that notion as the gospel truth, there is no part of the computing stack that can survive as a stable, uniform standard, including the base architecture. But computing as a whole is resilient to such changes. Having a special hardware instruction is a competitive advantage if it's used, but it tends to exist as implementation detail and doesn't carry the weight of an end-user feature. A chip design can target some subset of applications, but software fallbacks are expected, and software developers increasingly don't attempt to optimize to the hardware, making it a commodity. In that light RISC-V arrives at a time where it's very unlikely to matter. A decreasing share of applications will need to look that deeply.