Post #2170446

RISC-V is designed to be an extensible instruction set, where the base is very minimal and reduced but a plethora of extensions exist. The ISA can be small for academic and microcontroller uses, large (more than a hundred extensions) for server uses, or anything in between. Despite the name, a powerful RISC-V server can arguably not be considered "RISC", though that term doesn't have a single agreed-upon meaning and some design characteristics strongly associated with RISC still apply such as limiting memory access to dedicated load/store instructions only rather than allowing computation instructions to operate on memory. Also, not everything is CPU instructions. Acceleration for media codecs, for example, normally means off-loading those tasks to the GPU rather than the CPU. Even if the CPU and GPU are both part of the same SoC, that doesn't touch the CPU instruction set.