If you're curious about the origins of RISC-V, check out Andrew Waterman's PhD thesis "Design of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture" ("Why Develop a New In

If you're curious about the origins of RISC-V, check out Andrew Waterman's PhD thesis "Design of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture" ("Why Develop a New Instruction Set?"). It's quite readable and has a nice comparison of ISA encodings of RISC-V, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, ARMv7/8, Thumb, OpenRISC, and x86/x86-64. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.p...