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> real value will be in the implementations themselves. It is not that difficult to re-target a micro-architecture (what you call implementation) to a new ISA,
by YorkshireSeason 5y ago
> real value will be in the implementations themselves.
It is not that difficult to re-target a micro-architecture (what you call implementation) to a new ISA, especially if the ISAs relatively close, as most modern ISAs are. RISC-V and Arm ISAs are an example where that should be especially easy.
- admax88qqq 5y agoTotally, all the more reason that the specific ISA is less important than the implementation/micro-arch. Why pay for ARM if you can retarget to RISC-V and still retain most of the benefits of your designs.
- baq 5y agoyou'll pay ARM for a good ARM RISC-V CPU.
- YorkshireSeason 5y agoAs "baq" also says: you pay Arm (or Apple, or Qualcomm or ...) for the micro-architecture. I expect Arm to drop licensing costs for their ISA to zero to compete with RISC-V at the low end. Right now, the Arm ISA has much better micro-architectures than RISC-V, why bother with RISC-V? I think this will change over the next 5 years. One of the ways to change this could be Arm selling RISC-V implementations. Of course there are also dangers in RISC-V: one is that we will get too many RISC-V versions, so no stable software ecosystem emerges for any single one of them. Adapting Linux, GCC and so on to your specific version of RISC-V (or any processor really) is rather expensive.