A mediocre early 90s design that is totally unencumbered is a lot better than a mediocre late 70s design hacked beyond the limits of sanity. Or would be. The

A mediocre early 90s design that is totally unencumbered is a lot better than a mediocre late 70s design hacked beyond the limits of sanity. Or would be. The fact is RISC-V is a distinct improvement on early 90s designs such as MIPS III and has also learned lessons from Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, and AMD64. In many ways RISC-V and Aarch64 (which were being designed in parallel unknown to each other) learned the same lessons from those earlier ISAs, though they made several trade-offs differently.