alt Hacker News> it's the fact that it is an open standard not encumbered by intellectual property law.
There are actually many of those. But Risc-V has become, through effective marketing, the Schelling point for anybody who wants to avoid the x86 and Arm ecosystems, both for the rent-seeking behaviors you mention, and also, in some instances, for security reasons.
And, as others have mentioned, the ISA doesn't really matter. As long as it's agreed upon, then the CPU vendors can optimize on one side, and the compiler writers on the other side.
Sure, Risc-V has its warts, but you can certainly say the same about all the rest.
Replies
x86 is basically one big cabinet of horrors, but people seem to put up with it because it's "the standard." Then why not with RISC-V? Which is much if not infinitely better.
> […] then the CPU vendors can optimize on one side […]
I find the statement ironic and somewhat amusing (or bemusing – depending on the perspective) for reasons entirely unrelated to CPU's and/or RISC-V.
I keep hearing the phrase «we shall leave that to the vendors» every now and then. Only a few days ago, whilst attending a working-group session on an emerging data exchange standard, precisely the very much same argument was bluntly stated: «We do not particularly care how complex the specification becomes because the vendors will implement it. We shall leave it to them».
The issue is that «the vendors» are not a single mythical intelligence or force possessed of infinite technical wisdom, unlimited, cosmic scale engineering resources and an relentless desire to right the wrongs.
They are businesses. They have narrow commercial objectives, conflicting priorities, disparities in the engineering talent and resourcing and, quite properly, incentives to advance their own products – you are right, to compete with other vendors. Where an opportunity appears to increase market share, lock customers in, differentiate their platforms and products or shift implementation burden elsewhere, one should expect them to notice it. It is not an accusation, it is merely an acknowledgement that vendors tend to behave like vendors.
So with «the vendors will do X», at best, we may hope that vendors will deliver an interpretation of the specification – to a degree, provided that doing so aligns sufficiently well with their commercial interests. An equally plausible outcome is that they will not – or that they will each implement mutually incompatible interpretations whilst proclaiming full compliance.
The ISA not mattering I think isn't as true when you account cost e.g. in a huge OOO cpu all the fusions and so on are afaict fairly doable but if you are on a cheaper / worse CPU all those extra bytes in the instruction stream do add up.