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walrus01yesterday at 11:51 PM3 repliesview on HN

> The market can sort it out for themselves

Because nobody will write software for 300 unique hardware variations of a platform that have inconsistent capabilities. Consistency is one of the reasons why x86-64 with extensions like like SSE, AVX2 etc is popular.


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kjs3today at 12:01 AM

Noone uses an 8051 because it's elegant. Billions are still still sold every year because no matter if you learned it in the 70s or last week and no matter who made it, the basics are exactly alike. Software matters; ISAs don't.

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hn_submittoday at 12:04 AM

I believe the market will standardize on certain extensions for specific solutions. No one is going to make a mobile phone with only RV32I, for example.

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fluffybucktsnektoday at 12:03 AM

> Because nobody will write software for 300 unique hardware variations

Who said they have to? One can select a RISC-V configuration for a baseline for a particular purpose. Desktop? Choose the one that's most powerful.

ARM is more popular than x86 and is less consistent than it.