[libre-riscv-dev] Why The Dual ISA

[Hendrik Boom]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:00:45AM -0500, Adam Van Ymeren wrote:
> 
> 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?

Whom are we actually committed to?  Would those people and organisations
just as happy with POWER as RISC-V?  Are they willing to commit to accepting 
such a switch? 

-- hendrik