[socialdemocrat]

I loved the 68k. It was what got me started with Assembly. But one of the key reasons I have an interest in RISC-V today is for its educational potential. I know how x86 killed my interest in assembly coding. ARM honestly isn't all that much better.

RISC-V gives people a way to learn and understand what a modern CPU is like. Remember Donald Knuth's books. He teaches algorithms on an imaginary CPU. As CISC architecture got superseded by RISC, he started using an imaginary RISC CPU in teaching.

His point is that people implementing stuff need to have some sense of how the hardware works to understand tradeoffs. RISC-V is in my view a great CPU arch to give that kind of understanding for somebody who is not necessarily interested in writing assemblers, compilers or what not.

Beyond that RISC-V really fits well with the heterogenous computing trend we are moving towards where specialized hardware is increasingly doing more and more of our tasks. I would say it is and advantage that these different specialized chips have some commonality between them. RISC-V is giving people a way of creating a whole ecosystem of chips for a variety of purpose which share a lot of instructions, debuggers, profilers, compilers and other tools.

There is no way x86 could be part of that revolution. x86 is stuck as a general purpose CPU. RISC-V on the other hand will power desktop computers, smart phones, micro-controllers, AI accelerator cards, super-computers and just about anything.