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  • I don't understand why they want to put the RISC-V spec behind the ISO paywall. It will just complicate the access to the standardized version to confirm compliance with it.
    by claudex
  • They're excited about putting the spec behind a notoriously closed paywall??

    Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.

    The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.

    There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]

    ISO def lacks luster, and maybe even relevance.

    [O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

    by intsunny
  • > The RISC-V ISA is already an industry standard and the next step is impartial recognition from a trusted international organization.

    I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.

    by usamoi
  • Why ISO? Why not somewhere that will allow people to read the standard for free?
    by charcircuit
  • Not sure if this is a good idea given how ISO has been going for programming languages.
    by pjmlp
  • What's the advantage of standardizing through ISO/IEC? Better adoption in industry?

    Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.

    by axblount
  • I wonder why. Marketing? ISO tax mandatory to access some specific markets? That said, they should be careful on what they will pay in order to get an ISO stamp. And what parts of RISC-V will be covered... because RVA may probably get significant changes (after a while it may drop some hardware requirements which are kind of only here to help port from legacy ISA to RISC-V). Not to mention, it seems there are doubts about the core memory reservation over ZACAS and only designers of large and performant RISC-V implementations could answer that, and maybe this is a fluke.

    It weirdly feels too early.

    ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.

    by sylware
  • A large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied.

    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.

    Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.

    by fork-bomber

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