It was never going to go any other way for the RVA* profiles. Qualcomm’s other proposal to add a standard extension with more complex (Aarch64-like) instructio

It was never going to go any other way for the RVA* profiles. Qualcomm’s other proposal to add a standard extension with more complex (Aarch64-like) instructions to the ISA should be a totally independent question. There is plenty of room for it in the ISA, people can choose to implement it or not, and if more than one vendor wants such an extension then it makes sense to standardize it. ISA is one thing. Providing alternative extensions that implementors can choose between according to their needs is a good thing. Profiles — that is a set of extensions for a particular application space, which vendors must implement and shrink-wrapped software can depend on — is a totally different thing, which MUST have strong backward compatibility guarantees. The right decision has been made concerning the RVA* profile series. I hope this doesn’t preclude discussion regarding a standard extension to the ISA.