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Its not 'under-debated' it been literally debated in every single forum that ever had a post about RISC-V. Its literally the most debated thing. The reason its

by nickik 6y ago

Its not 'under-debated' it been literally debated in every single forum that ever had a post about RISC-V. Its literally the most debated thing. The reason its not very likely to happen is because we have a gigantic open source ecosystem that is unlikely to for free adopt your extension unless you pay them to do it. At the end of the day, you simply can't force hardware designer into some standard unless your ISA is proprietary.

klelatti 6y ago
"Unlikely" and "for free". So it could happen and yes firms do pay for changes to open source software. You really haven't answered the point about what's stopping a big vendor adding its own extensions and fragmenting the ecosystem.
- nickik 6y ago
  Nothing is stopping it, just as nothing is stopping people from copying any open source software. My point is exactly, its not designed to 'stop it'. In fact, the opposite. If somebody wants to replicate large parts of the open source ecosystem to support their extension then that's ok. The point is, that most of the time this simply doesn't happen and if it does, it doesn't actually hurt those that want to hold to the standard. In some segments of the market, doing such is perfectly fine and encouraged. In others its much more unlikely, difficult and expensive. RISC-V is designed to work from the smallest embedded chip to the largest server. Trying to create some sort of universality would never work, and trying to use legal means of preventing such is simply a bad idea and an anti-pattern. The ecosystem is designed so that all software is able to handle the different configuration and understand when a software is not supported and why. Its designed to have the base system be maximally portable and to cover most things in standard extensions so that new implementations can access a huge amount of tooling and software without issue.

by nickik 6y ago

klelatti 6y ago

"Unlikely" and "for free". So it could happen and yes firms do pay for changes to open source software. You really haven't answered the point about what's stopping a big vendor adding its own extensions and fragmenting the ecosystem.

nickik 6y ago
Nothing is stopping it, just as nothing is stopping people from copying any open source software. My point is exactly, its not designed to 'stop it'. In fact, the opposite. If somebody wants to replicate large parts of the open source ecosystem to support their extension then that's ok. The point is, that most of the time this simply doesn't happen and if it does, it doesn't actually hurt those that want to hold to the standard. In some segments of the market, doing such is perfectly fine and encouraged. In others its much more unlikely, difficult and expensive. RISC-V is designed to work from the smallest embedded chip to the largest server. Trying to create some sort of universality would never work, and trying to use legal means of preventing such is simply a bad idea and an anti-pattern. The ecosystem is designed so that all software is able to handle the different configuration and understand when a software is not supported and why. Its designed to have the base system be maximally portable and to cover most things in standard extensions so that new implementations can access a huge amount of tooling and software without issue.