I&#x27;m surprised to see a lot of RISC proponents still around, because I think it&#x27;s quite clear that things didn&#x27;t quite work out the way they thought it would --- the vision of cheap, simple, high-performance CPUs just didn&#x27;t happen. Thus I&#x27;m not of the opinion that another &quot;MIPS, but free&quot; 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 &quot;it&#x27;s actually really bad, but we don&#x27;t want to say that&quot;... after all, who would call benchmarks &quot;controversial&quot; if they were winning? There do tend to be few comparative benchmarks, but here&#x27;s one that shows how ARM and x86 are competitive, but MIPS is behind in energy efficiency:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;extreme&#x2F;188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;extreme&#x2F;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&#x27;s microarchitectures than MIPS and the like.<p>I think a &quot;CISC-V&quot; 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. &quot;x86, but free&quot;. (&quot;ARM, but free&quot; would likely not work for legal reasons.)