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The point on unconstrained extensibility I think is largely around the fact that anyone can add extensions wheras with ARM, the company retains control. There
by klelatti 6y ago
The point on unconstrained extensibility I think is largely around the fact that anyone can add extensions wheras with ARM, the company retains control.
There are advantages to the RISC-V approach it is likely to lead to more fragmentation - and worse gives the ability for a major implementation to add proprietary extensions that are not licensed to anyone else putting smaller players at a disadvantage and leading to fragmentation, not only in the hardware but also in the software ecosystems.
Whilst you may not like ARM having control at least everyone (for a fee) has full access to the ISA and implementations.
- Symmetry 6y agoThe extensibility that leads to the danger of fragmentation for general purpose computing is a great advantage for embedded computing where your software or firmware is targeting one particular piece of hardware and doesn't have to be compatible with anyone else. Western Digital is free to put in the mix instructions they need for their hard driver controllers and NVidia is free to put in the instructions they need to control their video cards and the incompatibility between them just doesn't matter.
- klelatti 6y agoWhich is great and fine as no-one else will be writing software for that particular hardware. I believe that ARM has been allowing some extensions for their M series designs in these circumstances - partly due to pressure from RISC-V alternatives. I should add that I think that it's possible that Nvidia/ARM combination will remove ARMs 'level playing field' and we might see Nvidia only extensions for their designs - which would not be good. We'll have to see.