Then, there's NASA, and their rad hard HPSC RISC-V. It's a product now, with a Microchip part number (PIC64-HPSC1000-RH) and a second source (SiFive, apparently.) I suppose it's conceivable the a Berkeley CA developed ISA that has been officially adopted as new rad hard avionics CPU platform by the US government's primary aerospace arm could get voted off the island in some timeline, but it's looking fairly improbable at this point.

But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.

Only time will tell if it ends like: "to avoid someone else shooting us, let's shoot ourselves".

Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.

> There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.

> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.

Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.

> attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V

Is this real? Or FUD?

Yeah. I think the ISO process would likely slow down the development of the ISA.

Government agencies like to take standards off the shelf whenever they can. Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives).

Random example I found at a glance: NIST recommending use of a specific ISO standard in domains not formally covered by a regulatory body: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...

As the article says:

> “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”

My take is that it could help tie up fragmentation. RISC-V has different profiles defining what instructions come with for different use cases like a general purpose OS, and enshrining them as an ISO standard would give the entire industry a rallying point.

Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means

Maybe it helps get government contracts

“We’re standards compliant”

It ticks a checkbox. That's it. Some organizations and/or governments might have rules that emphasize using international standards, and this might help with it.

I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).

This allows RISC-V international to propose their standards as ISO/IEC standards.

ISO defines standards for much more than bolts and plugs. A few examples include: the C++ ISO standard, IT security standards and workplace safety standards, and that’s a small subset of what they do.

They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.

> It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.

you my friend have not delved into the rabbithole that is standardisation organizations.

ISO and IEC goes so far beyond bolts and screws it's frankly dizzying how faar reaching their fingers are in our society.

As for why, the top comment explained it well; There is a movement to block Risk-v adoption in the US for some geopolitical shenanigans. A standardisation with a trusted authority may help.

FTA: “Since 1987, JTC 1 has overseen the standardization of many foundational IT standards, including JPEG, MPEG, and the C and C++ programming languages”

Compared to ISO, RISC-V International has almost no experience maintaining standards.

Even if you think that’s isn’t valuable, the reality is that there is prestige/trustworthiness associated with an “ISO standard” sticker, similar to how having a “published in prestigious journal J” stickers gives scientific papers prestige/trustworthiness.

Test suites: https://github.com/riscv-software-src/riscv-tests

Formal model: https://github.com/riscv/sail-riscv

Yeah Rivos apparently taped out a high performance server class core (probably only a test chip I'd guess) before Meta bought them.

There are plenty of multi core designs (that's easy) but they aren't very fast.

In terms of open source XiangShan is the most advanced as far as I know. It's fairly high performance out-of-order.

I don't think there's anything M5-level and probably won't be for a while (it took ARM decades so it's not a failing). I doubt we'll see any serious RISC-V laptops because there probably isn't demand (maybe Chromebooks though?). More likely to see phones and servers because Android is supporting RISC-V, and servers run Linux.

In terms of extensions I think it's pretty much all there. Probably it needs some kind of extension to make x86 emulation fast, like Apple did. The biggest extension I know of that isn't ratified is the P packed SIMD one but I don't know if there's much demand for that outside of DSPs.

Tenstorrent has announced Ascalon development boards TBA 2026Q2.

That's not gonna beat the M5, but it should be similar or better relative to M1, and a huge performance jump for RISC-V.

People with absolutely no technical clue who only know "ISO 9001" equate "ISO" with quality initiatives and certifications.

What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability.

ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions.

If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium.

That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.

Good marketing, this could open up more large investment into RISC-V.

>bad decisions they double down on.

Could you elaborate?