alt Hacker NewsRISC-V truly is the RyanAir of processors: Oh, you want FP maths? That's an optional extra, did you check that when you booked? And was that single or double-precision, all optional extras at an extra charge. Atomic instructions, that's an extra too, have your credit card details handy. Multiply and divide? Yeah, extras. Now, let me tell you about our high-end customer options, packed SIMD and user-level interrupts, only for business class users. And then there's our first-class benefits, hypervisor extensions for big spenders, and even more, all optional extras.
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Then x86_64 is the cable television service of processors. "Oh, you want channel 5? Then you have to buy this bundle with 40 other channels you will never watch, including 7 channels in languages you do not speak."
>Multiply and divide
And where it actually mattered they did not introduce a separate extension. Integer division is significantly more complex than multiplication, so it may make sense for low-end microcontrollers to implement in hardware only the latter.
Yes, adding instructions to your ISA has a cost
So it's modular. This is normally considered a good thing. It means you don't have to pay for features you don't need.
The ISA is open so there's no greedy corporation trying to upsell you. I mean there's an implementation and die area cost for each extension but it's not being set at an artificial level by a monopolist.