alt Hacker NewsDesigning a good 64-bit ISA, much better than RISC-V, is easy.
There are thousands of people who could design such an ISA in a couple of weeks, without any AI assistance.
The hard part, which has always been the moat of RISC-V, is writing all the required support software for a new ISA, i.e. all the utilities from binutils (assembler, static linker, ELF/DWARF utilities), compiler backends at least for gcc and llvm, debugger (at least a port for gdb server), dynamic linker and standard C library, possibly some parts of the standard libraries for other programming languages.
Previously this could have taken years and it is the only reason that has always justified the choice of RISC-V for minimum cost, despite how bad the ISA is.
If today the porting of all these software support applications to a new ISA could be accelerated with AI assistance from a couple of years to a couple of months, that would certainly enable the design and use of custom ISAs, and RISC-V would lose its appeal.
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The effort to support architectures is now minimal with AI assistance. I made a hobby architecture (based on Intel, but with some changes; I was making an "alternate history" as if a few decisions in the past had been different) and it was pretty much trivial to spit out support not just in gcc and llvm, but I also, for fun, made WATCOM backends and a few other things.
With that said, RISC-V is a nice baseline for designing another architecture. Start with RISC-V, and go from there.
That's why I've never understood the point of RISC-V. Anyone can design a (reasonably OK) ISA. It's everything else that's the hard part. It's like announcing a new house, it's going to be pained Benjamin Moore Yellow Oxide and everything else is someone else's problem to sort out. Success! We've got a new house!
The only argument I've ever seen for RISC-V that's vaguely logical is that there's no licensing to Arm involved, but since I can get M0/M3 devices for a dollar or so with infinite tool and library support that's something that's totally irrelevant for most users. And if I don't mind going with Chinese suppliers there's no licensing to Arm being paid anyway.
Apart from being able to thumb your nose at Arm, I just can't see what the point of RISC-V is. Is that really all there is going for it?
> Designing a good 64-bit ISA [...] is easy [...] could design such an ISA in a couple of weeks
Let me know when you've got it all worked out and published. Should be easy, right?