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by bem94 1961 days ago
> I can't imagine RISC-V beyond niche applications unless someone publishes a more strictly specified version of it that provides a unified platform.

They're working on this right now. Niche applications can still do their thing, but there will be standard profiles for e.g. a "Linux class" application processor, or an "ARM Cortex-M*" equivalent micro-controller.
2 comments
yoshuaw 1961 days ago
That's really cool, I had no idea!

Did a quick search on this, and I believe the Linux portion of this is the responsibility of the "UNIX-Class Platform Specification Task Group" [1]. They seem to be quite active, which I'm reading as a sign things are progressing.

[1]: https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unixplatformspec

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bem94 1961 days ago
Right you are, that's the group responsible. It's something of a priority for RISC-V international right now, because of exactly this worry.

RISC-V International is sometimes really bad at communicating that it's working on these problems. But odds on, they usually are.

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api 1961 days ago
They need to be sure there are as few of these targets as possible. I'd suggest one 32-bit and one 64-bit, period.

Think of it like this: the difficulty of targeting RISC-V increases with the square of the number of variants.

It's a general rule in systems that difficulty and bugs increase exponentially, not linearly, as complexity increases.

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