RISC-V Used Because It’s Free?

Is the RISC-V microprocessor architecture mediocre and only used because it’s free?

RISC-V is seeing a lot of growth but also has a lot of detractors who dismiss it as a kind of toy. There is a curious human psychological phenomenon that makes people think complex and messy technology must be good while what seems clean and simply must somehow be a toy.

People think that because RISC-V is a clean and elegant design, it cannot be the real deal. This kind of thinking repeats itself so often it is almost becoming a bit of a joke. I first encountered this phenomenon in the 1980s when discussing the merits of the Commodore Amiga computer compared to IBM compatible PCs. The other kids were convinced that the PC had to be the more advanced computer because it was so complicated to use. To get anything working, we had to edit Autoexec.bat and Config.sys configuration files. This was the price one had to pay for the sophistication of a PC — or so I was told. In retrospect, it was utterly ridiculous. The PC in question ran MS DOS, a single-task, text based operating system with a 600 KB memory limit. Amiga had a full graphical, pre-emptive multitasking operating system with specialized hardware chips to accelerate graphics, audio and other tasks.

Yet people refused to believe that a computer that was so pleasant to use was somehow more advanced. People like to think that their efforts and their pains must be for a reason. Nobody wants to think hard work is for…