Comment by clarry

> A free ISA is about more than saving a few pennies on each board in royalties, it's about having a chip you can truly trust. One that doesn't have some opaque binary blob running at ring -2. One where nothing is encrypted by a key only the manufacturer (and whomever they can strike a deal with) has. About hardware you truly own and control.

This has basically nothing to do with the ISA. It's not the ISA that hides secrets and requires binary blobs. A chip is much more than an instruction set, hence why dealing with the proprietary undocumented garbage to bring up a new ARM SoC is a pain in the ass even if you've memorized every ARM instruction down to its encoding...

If RISC-V gets picked up and used by mainstream chipmakers in the SBC & TV BOX & mobile space, there is no doubt we will end up with chips that have proprietary undocumented garbage interfaces. Just like they also now take something like the (open source) ATF or OP-TEE, implement support for their own chip, and then publish a binary blob without source code.