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But that's not a problem at all. It still guarantees that a program compiled for RISC-V will run on this CPU. Moreover, they have no motivation to introduce to
by avianes 5y ago
But that's not a problem at all.
It still guarantees that a program compiled for RISC-V will run on this CPU.
Moreover, they have no motivation to introduce too many non standard/proprietary extensions as it would require them to add support for these new instructions in mainstream compilers, while they could - with standard extensions - take advantage of the work already done for standard extensions.
Today, a major difficulty a newcomer to the industry faces is that they have 2 options:
1 - Taking an existing ISA and paying a license fee, but benefiting from the work already done on the compiler side.
or
2 - Building their own new ISA for free, but having to do all the work on the compiler side by themselves from scratch.
With RISC-V this problem does not exist anymore which opens the door to newcomers.
- pjmlp 5y agoLike UNIX workstation wars won by NeXTSTEP in the end, come for POSIX (RISC-V in this case) compatibility, stay for the extensions.
- avianes 5y agoHardware and Software have very different dynamics, therefore the comparison with POSIX is very weak. There is no way today to build competitive opensource hardware, and RISC-V is not about providing opensource hardware. With RISC-V (or any other ISA) we remain mainly dependent on the manufacturer who implement whatever they want within your processor. I think you are expecting too much from RISC-V, it's not about winning a war against manufacturers, it's about providing a royalty-free high-performance standard ISA which makes it easier for newcomers to enter the market. RISC-V is built around the idea that manufacturers can make their own non-standard extensions and benefit from existing work.