this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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RISC-V has already been ruined by a zillion proprietary vendor extensions.
Can the extensions not be replaced?
no it's part of the physical hardware design
What I mean is, given the open source nature of RISC V, if someone puts out a chip with a proprietary extension, isn't it likely that there will be a rip off that does the same but in an alternative manner? Like how there's tonnes of Raspberry Pi like boards available.
The RISC-V is an extensible ISA, so yes. All those vendor extensions are optional, when fabricating the processor, which can be replaced by other extensions over time.
Both Intel and AMD have had vendor extensions in the designs that they no longer use, even ones that have been "retracted" (i.e whatever in the heck Intel is doing with their AVX extensions).
But yeah, currently, there are a lot of proprietary extensions, which could still be declared as open hardware as well. So yeah.
I'm honestly surprised that RISC V wasn't licensed so that it was only open architecture.