[t0b1]

though I believe in RISC-V‘s case what will happen is that every vendor will have that realization at the same time, not tell anyone and make an extension and now there‘s five different incompatible encodings for the same operation.

[snvzz]

And that doesn't matter, because:

- Such custom extensions live in custom extension space.

- Software ecosystem that must work across vendors will use neither.

- If these extensions actually do something useful, the experience from them will be leveraged to make a standard extension, which will at some point make it into a standard profile, and thus adopted by the software ecosystem.

[Pet_Ant]

Opensource fundamentally changes that situation. All you need is a maintained version of GCC/LLVM that supports your processor and you’ll have distro that supports your needs. Especially if it’s just about some performance boosting instructions. It’s not going to be an issue, we really aren’t in a binary world anymore for the most part.