Re: Some serious questions.
> Just about everything in your post is wrong
Oh noes!
> RISC-V was not introduced 12 years ago, some students and their professor had a crazy idea in a pub to START it 12 years ago. It was essentially introduced to the world a little under 7 years ago.
You might want to go and update Wikipedia with your detailed knowledge then, since that's where i sourced my timescales from. Or indeed, the official RISC-V history page.
Personally, I'd differentiate between the initial development of RISC as a concept, and the actual implementation of RISC-V. Since as the name suggests, RISC-V is actually the fifth generation of RISC design!
Beyond that...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
https://riscv.org/about/history/
major RISC-V milestones were the first tapeout of a RISC-V chip in 28nm FDSOI [...] in 2011, publication of a paper on the benefits of open instruction sets in 2014 2, the first RISC-V Workshop held in January 2015, and the RISC-V Foundation launch later that year with 36 Founding Members.
For me, the fact that the design was open-sourced and taped out in 2011 is the key date; it may have then taken 5 or 6 years for RISC-V to be publically debuted, but that doesnt change when the "1.0" specification was released.
> Dave Patterson invented the term "RISC" and the first RISC I CPU around 1980-1981, not 1990. I can only assume you weren't born at those times and consider them prehistoric.
Ooo. It's always a pleasure to be considered younger than i actually am ;) Sadly, while I was a little young to be using computers in 1980, I did start poking buttons on a ZX Spectrum in 1983 or so.
And again, I was quoting Wikipedia:
The term RISC dates from about 1980 [...and academic research...] resulted in the RISC instruction set DLX for the first edition of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach in 1990 of which David Patterson was a co-author, and he later participated in the RISC-V origination.
RISC may have been "named" in 1980 - ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine back in 1983 - but again, for me, the release of the DLX paper in 1990 is where RISC-V was born, especially since the author of that paper - David Patterson himself - had a huge hand in designing RISC-V.
But then, the nice thing about opinions is that everyone has one!
> ARM does NOT allow you to add or remove things from their CPU core or the instruction set. Of course you can add whatever you like else in the SoC, as you don't license that from ARM and ARM doesn't make such IP
Odd. I must have dreamed up the link which I added to my post, about how ARM lets you add custom instructions to your CPUs.
No, wait...
https://www.arm.com/technologies/custom-instructions
Certainly, Arm Custom Instructions support the intelligent and rapid development of fully integrated custom CPU instructions. sounds like exactly what you're talking about, unless im missing something major.
> The Raspberry Pi is very far from standard. There are simply a lot of them. (Compared to other SBCs, not compared to phones or tablets)
This one is a bit more subjective. But for me, the argument would be that once something has a significant market share, it's effectively a standard, as also happened with Apple's iOS devices. Certainly, there's a very large and healthy eco-system for both iOS and RPi devices, with far more peripherals, expansions, etc available than for any other devices - or indeed, all other similar devices combined.
I'd also note that the RPi is based on a fairly standard ARM "mobile phone" SoC, which means it's able to hook into standard Linux/Android/Windows toolings and libraries.
So while I can see some merits to your argument, I still think that from a practical perspective, the RPi is a standard!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
