Re:RISC-V Business: Testing StarFive's VisionFive 2 SBC
by klelatti on Saturday March 04, 2023 @10:15AM
(#35021352)
> It has the advantage of being designed from a clean slate, decades after the incumbent ISAs,
Unless it was designed in 2030 - which would be an impressive feat given we are in 2023 - it was not designed decades after current incumbent ISAs.
There's no such trade-off. The ISA is designed to scale from the smallest embedded microcontrollers to the top supercomputers.
It has the advantage of being designed from a clean slate, decades after the incumbent ISAs, with careful consideration put into every decision made and the hindsight of every other ISA to draw from.
The (relatively cheap) book "RISC-V Reader" presents a good introduction to the ISA and its design, with chapters covering each extension and comparing with incumbent ISAs.
The incumbent ISAs end up looking very bad. Note that the book is written by the main architects of the ISA, so it is of course very biased. They do however manage to keep it reasonably objective and to make really good points.