&gt; What worries me more is something like Nvidia&#x27;s Denver architecture because that&#x27;s actually a full abstraction above machine code.<p>What relieves me is that RISC-V is demonstrating that opensource hardware can be a reality. This will provide people with a concrete alternative to Intel and ARM chips that does away with (closed) microcode and shadowy marketing&#x2F;security procedures.<p>Yes, we are far away from FPGA-ing our CPUs, but I see the years 2010 as the years 1980 for FLOSS code. In the &#x27;80s a bunch of people sent around tapes with copies of EMACS, cp and mkdir; 20 years later multibillion dollars infrastructures rely on open source.<p>Today we use Intel microprocessors fearing that their ME components will spy on us and that secure boot will lock us in. In some years we will just install our Debian-for-HW and be done with it. It is a liberating thought.