Comment by Joel_Mckay

2 days ago

Some are already on RVA23.1 even before the standard made it to more than 4 manufacturers product lines.

The meme joke about standards is sadly relevant for riscv. =3

https://xkcd.com/927/

As I’ve come to understand it, standards simplify intensionally, not extensionally. For those who select a part that is compliant with a standard, more standards to choose from is better because engineers are able to make better tradeoffs; they’re not forced to select a part that does way more than the application needs thus making the product more expensive if there are lots of “competing” standards: some do less some do more.

For RV, a litany of standardized modules creates a system where each capability that the module provides will have a standard interface. No manufacturer is forced to invent extensions bespoke to their implementation, but they’re not forced to support everything the most powerful models do either.

Just my two cents.

  • That is given, vendors actually _know_ what exact practical applications they are building for.

    • Sure, the constellation of features is no longer a general purpose computer in the retail context, but rather an ASIC appliance the ends up incompatible/useless rather quickly.

      Maybe Gentoo could tame that level of chaos... or people just buy ARM64 again knowing the software ecosystem already works. =3