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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Yes, but those were only two distict flavors, and both had a lot of pull. And those special instructions were only needed in special applications and drivers. With RISC-V we are talking about a dozen different flavors, all by small and mostly insignificant players and the commands that extend the basic command set are commands for quite common operations. Which is a totally different scenarion than the SSE/3DNow issue back then.


  • Actually, I think RISC-V is even worse than ARM. With ARM, at least you have a quite reliable instruction set on the CPU. With RISC-V, most vendors have their own extensions of the instruction set, which opens a big can of worms: Either you compile all your stuff for your own CPU, or you have a set of executables for each and every vendors flavor of RISC-V commands, or you exclusively use the RISC-V core commands. The first would be only for hardcore geeks, the second would be a nightmare to maintain, and the third would be not really efficient. Either way, it sucks.


  • While I have to maintain an old Windows 7 box to run some ancient software on it, I do most of my development work on a Linux machine. I use LibreOffice to read and write documents, use Inkscape for drawings in my documntation, but first and foremost, my main IDE is Linux native (although a Windows port does exist).