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RISC-V takes first step toward international ISO/IEC standardization
- axblount 11mo agoWhat's the advantage of standardizing through ISO/IEC? Better adoption in industry? Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.
- boredatoms 11mo agoMaybe it helps get government contracts “We’re standards compliant”
- userbinator 11mo agoIt's not like ARM and x86 are standardised by ISO either.
- signa11 11mo agothey are de-facto…
- eru 11mo agoYes, but if 30 years ago ARM had an ISO standard they could point to, that would have probably helped with government adoption? (It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)
- userbinator 11mo agoRelatedly, 30 years ago someone attempted to turn the Windows 3.1 API into an ISO standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interface_for_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interf... It didn't become one, but it did become standardised as ECMA-234: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-234/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
- eru 11mo agoWell, Wine shows that Win32 is the only stable ABI, even on Linux.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago>On May 5, 1993, Sun Microsystems announced Windows Application Binary Interface (WABI), a product to run Windows software on Unix, and the Public Windows Interface (PWI) initiative, an effort to standardize a subset of the popular 16-bit Windows APIs. >In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs Looks like that's what it was.
- miki123211 11mo agoGovernments seem to care about "self-sufficiency" a lot more these days, especially after what's happening in both China and the US right now. If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive. Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoYes, and they're both massively debated and criticised, to the point that the industry developed Risk-V in the firstplace. Not to mention the rugpull licensing ARM pulled a few years back.
- lambdaone 11mo agoThis is exactly what makes this such an interesting development. Standardization is part of the process of the CPU industry becoming a mature industry not dependent on the whims of individual companies. Boring, yes, but also stable.
- chithanh 11mo agoSometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees. Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
- kouteiheika 11mo agoIt ticks a checkbox. That's it. Some organizations and/or governments might have rules that emphasize using international standards, and this might help with it. I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).
- kmeisthax 11mo ago> the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee Casual reminder that they ousted one of the founders of MPEG for daring to question the patent mess around H.265 (paraphrasing, a lot, of course)
- jcelerier 11mo agoAs the article says: > “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”
- veltas 11mo agoSays that, but I don't agree with that. If anything it would have been less successful being picked up in discount markets if the specs weren't free for download, and I don't know what fringes they're trying to break into but probably none of them care whether the spec is ISO.
- rjsw 11mo agoThat can depend on how the spec gets made into an ISO standard. There is a process called "harvesting" that can allow the original author to continue to distribute an existing specification independently of ISO.
- jcelerier 11mo ago> Says that, but I don't agree with that I guess you just never had to fill in a grant application where you have to justify that you are using official standards so that you can get money
- veltas 11mo agoI'm guessing in those kinds of situations it doesn't matter about the arch given x86 and ARM also aren't ISO standards. The manufacturers however should comply with relevant quality standards.
- jcelerier 11mo agoit doesn't matter when there is no ISO standard for a given tech. But as soon as there is one, then you have to provide arguments as to "why didn't you use the standard".
- ryukoposting 11mo agoGovernment agencies like to take standards off the shelf whenever they can. Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives). Random example I found at a glance: NIST recommending use of a specific ISO standard in domains not formally covered by a regulatory body: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-63-4.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
- o11c 11mo agoIt's impossible to take ISO seriously after the .docx fiasco.
- hofrogs 11mo agoWhat .docx fiasco?
- lifthrasiir 11mo agoOffice Open XML, the standard behind .docx and other zipped XML formats, was fast-tracked into the international standard without many rounds of reviews (by the same JTC 1!).
- noir_lord 11mo agoThat’s the definition of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Is ISO as an organisation imperfect sometimes (as in the docs case) sure?, it’s composed of humans who are generally flawed creatures, is it generally a good solution despite that?, also sure. They’ve published tens of thousands off standards over 70 plus years that are deeply important to multiple industries so disregarding them because Microsoft co-opted them once 20 odd years ago seems unreasonable to me.
- marcosdumay 11mo ago> Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives). Of course this is a lie. But yes, governments like to claim that.
- 6SixTy 11mo agoMy take is that it could help tie up fragmentation. RISC-V has different profiles defining what instructions come with for different use cases like a general purpose OS, and enshrining them as an ISO standard would give the entire industry a rallying point. Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
- justahuman74 11mo agoriscv was already gaining a profile mechanism outside of ISO, for example 'RVA23' is a known set of extensions
- snvzz 11mo agoRISC-V never had a fragmentation problem, thanks to the profiles.
- IshKebab 11mo agoI wouldn't say it never had a problem, but the profiles are definitely a reasonable solution. However even with profiles there are optional extensions and a lot of undefined behaviour (sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the spec is just not especially well written).
- snvzz 11mo agoThe FUD keeps being brought up, but the solution here was in place before the potential issue could manifest. It started with G, later retroactively named RVA20 (with a minor extra extension that nobody ever skipped implementing), then RVA22 and now RVA23. All application processor implementations out there conform to a profile, and so do the relevant Linux distributions. Of course, in embedded systems where the vendor controls the full stack, the freedom of micromanaging which extensions to implement as well as the freedom to add custom extensions is actual value. The original architects of the ISA knew what they were doing.
- pjmlp 11mo agoHardly, see programming languages standards and compiler specific extensions.
- thebeardisred 11mo agoThis allows RISC-V international to propose their standards as ISO/IEC standards.
- jgord 11mo agobusywork ... but maybe good marketing - people somehow believe that ISO has some relationship to quality.
- blurbleblurble 11mo agoGood marketing, this could open up more large investment into RISC-V.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoBe honest, what does RISC-V offer that 10 year old AArch64 doesn't already provide? RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
- kryptiskt 11mo agoLess legal risk, ARM has grown litigious and wants a bigger piece of the pie.
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoIP costs real money, and consumers usually don't care how people split up their pies. 100% of a small pie is worth far less than a slice from a large pie. I've met people that made that logical error, and it usually doesn't end well. =3
- blurbleblurble 11mo agoWhat does <open source anything> offer that trusty old <proprietary burden> doesn't already provide?
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoI would agree for FPGA soft-cpu the RISC-V is an obvious choice. But in general, the next question will be which version did you deploy, and which cross-compiler do you use. All the documentation people search will have caveats, or simply form contradictory guidance. The problem isn't the ISA, but the ill fated trap of trying to hit every use-case (design variant fragmentation.) ARM 6 made the same mistake, and ARM8/9 greatly consolidated around the 64 bit core design. Indeed, an ISO standard may help narrow the project scope, but I doubt it can save the designs given the behavior some of its proponents have shown. =3
- darksaints 11mo agoAre there any promising core designs yet? Multi-core designs? Any promising extensions being standardized? I really want to believe, but I don't think we'll see anything like an M5 chip anytime soon simply because there's so little investment from the bigger players.
- snvzz 11mo agoTenstorrent has announced Ascalon development boards TBA 2026Q2. That's not gonna beat the M5, but it should be similar or better relative to M1, and a huge performance jump for RISC-V.
- IshKebab 11mo agoYeah Rivos apparently taped out a high performance server class core (probably only a test chip I'd guess) before Meta bought them. There are plenty of multi core designs (that's easy) but they aren't very fast. In terms of open source XiangShan is the most advanced as far as I know. It's fairly high performance out-of-order. I don't think there's anything M5-level and probably won't be for a while (it took ARM decades so it's not a failing). I doubt we'll see any serious RISC-V laptops because there probably isn't demand (maybe Chromebooks though?). More likely to see phones and servers because Android is supporting RISC-V, and servers run Linux. In terms of extensions I think it's pretty much all there. Probably it needs some kind of extension to make x86 emulation fast, like Apple did. The biggest extension I know of that isn't ratified is the P packed SIMD one but I don't know if there's much demand for that outside of DSPs.
- claudex 11mo agoI don't understand why they want to put the RISC-V spec behind the ISO paywall. It will just complicate the access to the standardized version to confirm compliance with it.
- veltas 11mo agoRISC-V has always been an ivory tower, with a lot of bad decisions they double down on. Not surprised they're rushing towards this outdated stamp of authority too.
- snvzz 11mo ago>bad decisions they double down on. Could you elaborate?
- veltas 11mo agoNo overflow/carry flag impacting safe overflow checking and bignum performance, the whole conditional move history and backpeddling and state of Zicond, the system for describing feature support is needlessly complicated and just a mess for users outside of embedded, the spec is written more like an academic paper than a CPU manual, vector instructions act like they're written for a coprocessor for some reason, bad frame pointer ABI support, etc.
- GoblinSlayer 11mo ago>safe overflow checking You mean rust? Rust uses unsigned integers for everything, they can be checked efficiently. Same for bignum.
- charcircuit 11mo agoWhy ISO? Why not somewhere that will allow people to read the standard for free?
- pjmlp 11mo agoNot sure if this is a good idea given how ISO has been going for programming languages.
- maxloh 11mo agoYeah. I think the ISO process would likely slow down the development of the ISA.
- muvlon 11mo agoNot only that, it might turn RISC-V from a specification freely available under a FOSS license into a proprietary standard that you have to pay 285 CHF (~$350) to buy a non-transferable license for.
- aleatorianator 11mo agoah, yes. OPEN like science or AI
- intsunny 11mo agoThey're excited about putting the spec behind a notoriously closed paywall?? Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world. The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves. There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0] ISO def lacks luster, and maybe even relevance. [O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
- fork-bomber 11mo agoA large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied. There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake. Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts. Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
- topspin 11mo agoThen, there's NASA, and their rad hard HPSC RISC-V. It's a product now, with a Microchip part number (PIC64-HPSC1000-RH) and a second source (SiFive, apparently.) I suppose it's conceivable the a Berkeley CA developed ISA that has been officially adopted as new rad hard avionics CPU platform by the US government's primary aerospace arm could get voted off the island in some timeline, but it's looking fairly improbable at this point. But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.
- baaron 11mo agoFor anyone else who thought this was simply a rad chip, it's radiation hardened https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/pic64-hpsc1000 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/pic64-hpsc1000
- rdsubhas 11mo agoOnly time will tell if it ends like: "to avoid someone else shooting us, let's shoot ourselves". Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
- Someone 11mo ago> There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake. > Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts. Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
- usamoi 11mo ago> The RISC-V ISA is already an industry standard and the next step is impartial recognition from a trusted international organization. I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
- BlobberSnobber 11mo agoISO defines standards for much more than bolts and plugs. A few examples include: the C++ ISO standard, IT security standards and workplace safety standards, and that’s a small subset of what they do. They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.
- tester756 11mo agoC++ "standard" sounds more like an example of why technology should avoid standards
- actionfromafar 11mo agoIf we are taking cheap potshots, there's a standard for standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ or in the proposed XKCD URI form xkcd://927
- 112233 11mo agoTitanic is not an example of why building ships has to be avoided. C++ is a great example, yes, of the damage ambitious and egotistical personas can inflict when cooperation is necessary.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- usrnm 11mo agoSay what you will about C++, but it is undoubtedly one of the most successful and influential programming languages in history.
- sylware 11mo agoI wonder why. Marketing? ISO tax mandatory to access some specific markets? That said, they should be careful on what they will pay in order to get an ISO stamp. And what parts of RISC-V will be covered... because RVA may probably get significant changes (after a while it may drop some hardware requirements which are kind of only here to help port from legacy ISA to RISC-V). Not to mention, it seems there are doubts about the core memory reservation over ZACAS and only designers of large and performant RISC-V implementations could answer that, and maybe this is a fluke. It weirdly feels too early. ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.
- thw_9a83c 11mo agoIt would be very cool to run the compiled code developed in an ISO/IEC-standardized language on an ISO/IEC-standardized CPU. It might even be standard-compliant.
- childintime 11mo agoI'd wish they'd write a test suite or certification program instead.. Those ISO standard documents are nowadays better parseable with a chatbot, but they are still the wrong language for the job.
- remexre 11mo agoTest suites: https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-tests https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-tests Formal model: https://github.com/riscv/sail-riscv https://github.com/riscv/sail-riscv
- LarsKrimi 11mo agoRISC-V cemented their own deathsentence when they brought seasoned MIPS software developers into their fold early on. The calling convention was botched, just like it had been for 10s of different MIPS ones And it was hyperoptimized before there was existing silicon, just like the SysV AMD64 calling convention was fucked up by Suse developers before there was existing silicon
- kilibe 11mo agoCongrats to RISC-V International on this pivotal milestone—being granted JTC 1 PAS Submitter status feels like the open ISA's official "welcome to the global stage." What strikes me most is how this isn't just procedural rubber-stamping; it's a deliberate reinforcement of RISC-V's ethos of transparency and collaboration, ensuring derivatives stay true while unlocking easier market access worldwide. In an era where AI and edge computing demand interoperable, royalty-free foundations, this could accelerate adoption in ways we've only dreamed of—imagine seamless RISC-V ecosystems spanning from Tokyo fabs to Silicon Valley startups.
- panick21 11mo agoThis likely makes sense because of some regulatory frameworks that require 'offical' standards.