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I think you misunderstood what he said and I know he wasn't joking, but I didn't point out that the implied context was for Tenstorrent's usage, thus data cente

I think you misunderstood what he said and I know he wasn't joking, but I didn't point out that the implied context was for Tenstorrent's usage, thus data center. He didn't mean that you just need six instructions (eg. Turing tarpit), he meant (and he's right) that the bulk of [integer] performance comes from a very small set of instructions, most critically loads and conditional branches. All of the discussed extensions helps specific workloads, but unless your workload is, say, 100% encryption all the time, then the crypto extension will only provide a trivial improvement on the _overall_ performance. Vector is a little bit different, but it (like AVX2/512) comes at a very significant cost and you better have software that can take advantage of it.

panick21_ 5y ago
The whole point of RISC-V is to be a universal architecture used for everything. The idea is to have profiles for different verticals and application. In these profiles you define what extensions you need. If there is really a significant win for a certain type of server workloads, that community will make its own profile and hopefully be able to get chips that utilize that. The problem is that there are also many mixed workloads and having lots of general compute can work pretty well if you want to run a broad set of extinctions. RISC-V is sort of a fluid spectrum from highly specialized to highly general depending on the use case.