Was on a call ahead of the RISC-V Summit last night where the topic came up.
Not to name drop but here's what David Patterson had to say (he's vice chair of RISC-V BoD among other things).
"One of brilliant features of RISC-v is modularity. Everyone wants an ecosystem that is adaptable but runs standard software. Defining profiles and platforms is the next thing on their slate. Binary compatibility is not the overwhelming thing in the SoC world that it was with microprocessors. Flexibility is one of the various attractive features of RISC-V."
The idea with profiles is that you create groupings of modules aimed at a specific use case.
So, yes, there needs to be some balancing of flexibility and compatibility/interoperability and there are concerns around this. (One of the processor analysts brought this up.) But people are aware and thinking about it.
When they say R64GC, the C is compressed while the G is short for I, M, A, F, D, Z, icsr, and Zifencei.
ARM does something similar. They have TONS of extensions, but then group them into 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, etc then also group them with the A, R, and M designators too.
Not to name drop but here's what David Patterson had to say (he's vice chair of RISC-V BoD among other things).
"One of brilliant features of RISC-v is modularity. Everyone wants an ecosystem that is adaptable but runs standard software. Defining profiles and platforms is the next thing on their slate. Binary compatibility is not the overwhelming thing in the SoC world that it was with microprocessors. Flexibility is one of the various attractive features of RISC-V."
The idea with profiles is that you create groupings of modules aimed at a specific use case.
So, yes, there needs to be some balancing of flexibility and compatibility/interoperability and there are concerns around this. (One of the processor analysts brought this up.) But people are aware and thinking about it.