3 ms·

Thanks. It's interesting to see the commonality (path dependence?) of these ISAs and RISC-V's extensible design. I'm reminded of "How DEC Developed Alpha" (1992

Thanks. It's interesting to see the commonality (path dependence?) of these ISAs and RISC-V's extensible design. I'm reminded of "How DEC Developed Alpha" (1992), an article describing how DEC designed the Alpha architecture to scale to handle a 1000-fold performance increase they anticipated over the next 25 years: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=144508 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=144...

brucehoult 3y ago
It would have worked too, if Alpha hadn't gone down along with the mismanaged company that owned it. That's perhaps the biggest thing about RISC-V: no one company can kill it by going out of business (DEC), by getting bored with it (Oracle with SPARC), or by deciding to replace it with something else (Intel with Itanium). If the company you were buying RISC-V disappears, you can choose from ten others -- maybe 100 or 1000 others one day. Or, if you have the skills, you can design your own ... maybe in an FPGA if technology has moved along and you were using an old design. Or if another ISA takes over, you can run a RISC-V emulator on whatever the new ISA is. All of this without any questions or worries about legality, licenses, patents.