[kriro]

Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.

I am a user, I like to tinker, I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things. If you live in a country that is threatened by export embargos and the like it also makes a lot of sense to prioritize open.

[PunchyHamster]

ISA being open matters very little if chip design isn't and RISC-V isn't going to change much here

[apitman]

The number of companies creating RISC V implementations is pretty hopeful. There's way more competition here than x64 or ARM, and that could yield some interesting results.

[dvdkon]

It matters in that it opens up competition and allows fully-open designs, which should keep prices low and products available, but you're right that having fully-open state-of-the-art chips is unlikely to happen any time soon.

[tw1984]

exactly.

in fact, such ISA is only going to fuel more closed ecosystems as it made hundreds of Chinese vendors to join the game for free, they all suddenly got the chance to build their totally closed platforms.

[ThrowawayR2]

Open standards don't mean a thing; you can't execute code on a standard. There are past open ISAs like OpenSPARC, MIPS, and OpenPOWER that never gained any traction.

High performance implementations, i.e. actual chips you can buy, are going to be proprietary and that's not going to change. Engineering hardware is expensive.

[LeFantome]

This is a bold prediction but I thing “alliances” will form where industry players collaborate (like we are seeing in video codecs). And the basic core could become an Open Source project just like Linux did. Operating Systems and codecs were (and are) expensive too.

But there are different levels of proprietary. Having your entire software ecosystem impossible to lock-in means something. And competition tends to breed openness.

MIPS certainly did gain a lot of traction. It was a real force at one point and the world is awash in them. But of course MIPS (the company) is RISC-V now.

[kjs3]

I'm fairly confident there's more than 1% of people who care about these things

If there were an economically viable number of people who cared about those things (and it would need to be significantly more than 1%), we'd be running SPARC or POWER or maybe SuperH derived systems, all of which have open source, royalty free implementations.

For example, OpenSPARC is something like 20 years old, and covers SPARC v8 through t2. SPARC LEON is a decade older, and is under a GNU license, and has been to space.

And that doesn't consider going the Loongsoon route: take an existing ISA (e.g. MIPS), just use it, but carve off anything problematic (4 instructions covered by patents).

It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that in the 'processor hierarchy of needs', an open source license is of no consequence in the actual market.

[LeFantome]

I hesitate to say this as you seem very knowledgeable but you are missing some pretty massive facts that destroy your argument here.

There are already literally billions of RISC-V chips in the wild. Qualcomm alone has shipped a billion or more. They wrote an article back in 2023 where they disclosed that they had already shipped 650 million of them by that point. Andes Technology has said that there are 2 billion chips using their IP. A recent industry report suggested that RISC-V could represent 25% of the global SoC market by 2030. That is based on growth trajectory, not speculation.

RISC-V is not some obscure ISA that cannot get any traction.

There are a dozen or more credible competitors designing modern 64 bit RISC-V CPUs. Most of them have shipped silicon. Some have shipped multiple generations. Has any ISA ever had so many independent companies independently creating core designs (not designs from a single source like ARM)?

Tenstorrent alone likely made $500 million dollars in 2025. Easier to confirm is that they closed a $650 million funding round.

NVIDIA has announced CUDA support for RISC-V. I do not remember them doing that for SPARC, or POWER, or SuperH.

The current RISC-V standard, RVA23, includes advanced instructions for things like vectorization and virtualization. Many large, important industry players are involved in designing future extensions as well.

RISC-V is an officially supported platform in many mainstream Linux distributions including aggressively commercial ones like Red Hat Enterprise Linux but also foundational ones like Debian and its derivatives (like Ubuntu).

GCC and Clang have excellent support for RISC-V. FFMPEG just released hand-written vector optimizations for RISC-V. Again, can we say this about any of the platforms you mentioned?

It's a pretty inescapable fact on the ground that RISC-V has an absolute mountain of support in the industry. And starting this year, multiple vendors will be shipping cores faster than you can license from ARM.

Honestly, what universe are you living in?

[tw1984]

> Some people care less about squeezing out performance and more about open standards. I like having more choices, especially open ones.

you need to be totally autistic to believe that Chinese vendors are going to share anything meaningful with you. they don't hate you, they want their paying customers to be happy, but the brutal competitions in China doesn't allow them to be open in any sense. For products like RISC-V processors and MCUs, the moat is extremely low, being open leads to quick death. It is not about how much stuff they share with you as paying customer, it is about how much they are willing to share with their competitors when there are hundreds of companies trying everything to survive.

as a developer, you just need to ask yourself a dead simple question - how such risc-v platforms are going to be more open than raspberry pi.

[LeFantome]

How you heard of Deep Computing?

They are pushing their RISC-V products into the Linux mainline before those products even ship.

Those autistic Chinese also contribute a rather surprising amount of Open Source RISC-V out of their academic world.

[webdevver]

I have increasingly negative things to say about this.

There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V. and I wonder if there really ever was any desire for it, at this point.

This whole "Open ISA" crap appears to be a thin veneer to funnel quite large sums of investment into an otherwise completely proprietary and locked-down environment that could never harm the incumbents in any meaningful way - while still maintaining just enough of a pretense of open source, that the (regrettably myself included) shallow nerds and geeks could get smitten by it.

Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

I want my SoC to have a special register that has the git SHA ID of the exact snapshot of the repository that was used to cook the masks. that, now that - is Open Source. that is Open Computing. And nothing less!

I dont care about the piece of paper with instruction encodings - the least interesting part of any computer!

Wasn't that the whole point? We're more than a quarter of a century in and we're still begging SoC vendors for datasheets. Really incredibly embarassing and disappointing.

[Shugyousha]

> Where is the RTL? Where are the GDSII masks? Why am I unable to look at the branch predictor unit in the Github code viewer? Or (God forbid!) the USB/HDMI/GPU IP? I reject the notion that these are unreasonable questions.

As you note correctly, the ISA is open, not this CPU (or board).

The important point is that using an open ISA allows you to create your own CPU that implements it. This CPU can then be open (i.e. you providing the RTL, etc.), if you so desire

I assume it will be much more difficult (or impossible?) to provide the RTL for a CPU with an AMD64 ISA, since that one has to be licensed. I wonder if you paying for the license allows you to share your implementation with the world. Even if it does, it's less likely that you will do so, given that you will have to pay for the licensing fee and make your money back

Since there is no license to pay for in case of RISC-V, it allows you to open up the design of your CPU without you having to pay for that privilege

[ksec]

Couldn't have said it better. The moments these people promise everything would be free is a massive red flag. Unfortunately it seems most poodle haven't learned the lesson.

[tw1984]

> There is (so far) nothing 'open' about RISC-V.

with the majority players being Chinese vendors (those you can buy, not including those building RISC-V for their own in-house applications), RISC-V is far less open than ARM or x64.

expecting openness from Chinese vendors is like trying to hook up with some virgin bar girls in your favourite gogo bar in Bangkok.

[apitman]

The RP2350 has a couple Hazard3 cores in it.

[swaits]

“People who care about these things” enough that they’re buying Mini ITX RV motherboards? Definitely well under 1% of the market.