[jl6]

I often come across problems, like intermittent graphical glitches, in Ubuntu Linux applications and think to myself "maybe I'll try fixing that bug". I start digging casually, and find that the real issue is not in the application but somewhere in the graphics stack. Or maybe the kernel. Oh no, it's in a closed-source driver. Then I despair and start thinking thoughts like "wouldn't it be nice to rewrite all this from first principles? That way I could get it right!"

Then I do some more research and find that all this flaky software is built on proprietary, minimally-documented hardware with its own stack of bugs, except those bugs will never get fixed because the IP is top-secret and the only ten people who understand it have already moved on to build the next product.

So RISC-V/lowRISC is enticing because it promises an architecture that is powerful enough to be more than a toy or academic exercise, and also fully open from the ground up, which the public can iterate on and finally fix bugs - or at least understand them.

(Yes I know, I'm mixing complaints about GPUs into a CPU conversation here...)

I'm also encouraged by the slowdown in Moore's Law - alternative architectures have historically been steamrollered by Intel's phenomenal process engineering capability. If process nodes reach a plateau, the mad miniaturization march of the last 50 years will pause for breath and let a much wider and deeper variety of hardware hackers get involved.