Why I will be using RISC-V in my next chip
I'm surprised to see a lot of RISC proponents still around, because I think it's quite clear that things didn't quite work out the way they thought it would --- the vision of cheap, simple, high-performance CPUs just didn't happen. Thus I'm not of the opinion that another "MIPS, but free" architecture is such a good idea.<p><i>Benchmarks are controversial but by most measures the RISC-V performance should be “good enough” for most use cases</i><p>In my experience, statements like this really mean "it's actually really bad, but we don't want to say that"... after all, who would call benchmarks "controversial" if they were winning? There do tend to be few comparative benchmarks, but here's one that shows how ARM and x86 are competitive, but MIPS is behind in energy efficiency:<p><a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-show...</a><p>Even modern ARM cores, an architecture that started out being very RISC, use microinstruction-based translation in their front end and probably have more in common with Intel's microarchitectures than MIPS and the like.<p>I think a "CISC-V" could be more interesting - something x86-like (AFAIK the remaining patents are only on the Pentium and above instruction set extensions, and those may expire soon, so 486 and below are now public-domain ISAs) with a small dense instruction set, but extended in a different direction. "x86, but free". ("ARM, but free" would likely not work for legal reasons.)