[libre-riscv-dev] Why The Dual ISA

[Adam Van Ymeren]

On 2020-01-19 04:07 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 3:50 AM Immanuel, Yehowshua U <yimmanuel3 at gatech.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> So just throwing it out there?
>>
> ya man :)
>
>
>> Why are we using the Dual ISA?
>>
> because as i said in the update, we have committments to users and to
> sponsors.
>

How firm are these commitments?  The crowd funding campaign hasn't start
yet has it?  Although it sounds like you have a solid plan for dual-ISA,
I wouldn't want to jeopardize the success of the project by including
unnecessary complexity.  I'm reminded of the saga that was the mini-HDMI
connector on EOMA68 and how much pain and delays that were caused by
even a seemingly simple part.  This is such a critically important
project, the world needs a commercially viable libre processor.

I'm assuming that the sponsor commitments are some of the NLnet proposals?

This is also a good illustration of how seemingly innocuous early
decisions can have significant impact later in the project.  The goal
really isn't, or shouldn't have been to make a libre RISC-V SoC, but to
make just a libre SoC.  RISC-V seemed like such an obvious choice early
on, and I'm sure the name helped raise the profile of this project to
begin with, but in the end was not the right choice.

Unrelated question, are you up here in Canada?