Re: Cutting off their nose
> Is that a polite way of saying it's a pile of obsolete shit?
Not at all, it would be like if you could cherry pick the best design features of every car that has ever existed, but were limited to cars older than 20 years ago. Not a lot has fundamentally changed on the outside and inside of a car in the last 20 years. They still typically have 4 wheels, they still typically have a round steering wheel, mirrors, seats, something that converts an energy source into mechanical power, energy source, glove box (say that out loud and think about it for a half a second), wind shields, doors, boot, bonnet/hood, ....
And the same is true of an Instruction Set Architecture, the fundamentals have not changed much in 20+ years (Two companies come to mind Mill Computing Inc with its Mill CPU architecture and Ascenium Inc with it's Aptos general-purpose processor without an instruction set, when it comes to trying to make major changes to CPU's). What has changed is how the instructions are processed and that is mostly decided by what is sitting behind or underneath the ISA carrying out the actual instructions. It is probably going to be something like a 13-stage, four-issue, out-of-order pipeline execution with a re-order buffer (ROB) and a register alias table (RAT) for branch misprediction recovery at the high end. And if you are licensing IP that is the kind of thing you would try and buy if you needed performance. And if you were trying to make your own totally from scratch, I tip my hat to you.
What the RISC-V ISA did was take a tiny bit from a Porsche, a tiny bit from a Jaguar, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce, Dodge Charger, Ford Gran Torino, Mustang Cobra II, Pontiac Trans Am, Batmobile, Subaru, Hyundai, Audi, Lexus, Mazda, BMW, DeLorean, Mini, Ford Model-T and somehow managed to merge them into something that was more than the sum of the individual pieces. If you dig very deep into the actual binary of the RISC-V ISA your jaw hits the floor at what they managed to do. Some decisions made about the ISA reduce the amount of transistors needed to decode instructions - a lot of thought by a lot of very smart people has gone into the ISA. RISC-V is impressive, and if you license IP then you can gain access to most of the patented innovations made in the last 20 years which are mostly behind or underneath the ISA.