[Arnavion]

Is it the logical end that we have custom cores everywhere? Yes RISC-V is open and relatively straightforward to implement (coincidentally I did just that over the weekend in a circuit simulator game), but I can also see economies of scale making it so that a few vendors end up making cores that are good enough for all use cases between them and end up dominating the market. A few low-powered 32E cores, a few desktop-grade 64GCBV... alphabet soup (or more likely, hanzi lamian) cores, and a few in between would seem to be enough.

[dwoxctbvgq]

May I ask what circuit simulator game? I've attempted something similar with my very limited and hobby level hardware knowledge in Virtual Circuit Board and I learned that it would take me much longer than a weekend, heh.

[Arnavion]

Turing Complete - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/

I also made my own assembler as part of learning the ISA and put it at https://github.com/Arnavion/riscv . You can see a screenshot and video of the CPU in action there.

The game's campaign walks you through creating a simple 8-bit CPU and then a larger CPU similar to old ARM. But then it also has a sandbox to do whatever, and you can use whatever design you want to solve the puzzles intended for the original two CPUs.