Steering body calls for help to 'identify ISA gaps, build plans for future extensions'
www.theregister.com, Apr. 01, 2022 –
The momentum behind RISC-V is growing with the backing of tech heavyweights, but it comes with a challenge: encouraging CPU designers to stay on the same page, and to avoid the sort of fragmentation that happened in MIPS and Android.
With that in mind, RISC-V International, which coordinates the development of the open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), has turned to its community for guidance and to determine what its priorities should be in the coming years.
Last week, the organization shared a survey on its mailing list to collect feedback to "help identify ISA gaps, build plans for future extensions, and preserve compatibility among RISC-V applications."
The point of the survey is to get an idea of what the community is working on, and if there's a strong desire to standardize some of the non-standard extensions being developed privately, RISC-V International chief technology officer Mark Himelstein told The Register.