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Comment by kazinator

19 hours ago

People with absolutely no technical clue who only know "ISO 9001" equate "ISO" with quality initiatives and certifications.

What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability.

ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions.

If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium.

That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.

> is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions

I doubt it - the ISO standard will still allow custom extensions.

A standard 64bit+DSP RISC-V would go a long way for undoing the fragmentation damage caused by the "design by committee" implications.

..it was the same mistake that made ARM6 worse/more-complex than modern ARM7/8/9. =3