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In fact, one of the main reasons for RISC-V's existence is fragmentation - the ISA is meant to be extended and not meant to be one-size-fits-all. The core of th
by piperswe 4y ago
In fact, one of the main reasons for RISC-V's existence is fragmentation - the ISA is meant to be extended and not meant to be one-size-fits-all. The core of the ISA is designed for everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers, but extensions tend to fall closer to one side of that.
- shash 4y agoOr, an other way to put it is, it’s an attempt to build diversity without fragmentation. The spec follows the open closed principle in a sense - it’s open for extension but closed for modification, and if you choose to target say RV64G, you know that it will run on most 64 bit RISC-V processors. If you choose an extension, it’s not all that different from, say, figuring out which of Intel’s various SSE extensions is actually available. Of course, there are vendors who are only RISC-V adjacent, but they will either put up, shut up or subsume the entire ecosystem if they get big enough. Time will tell.