Sometimes It’s Not About The Technology or The Performance
“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.” – W. Edwards Deming
New microprocessor designs often emerge from universities. But how often do processors go back into universities?
It’s a new decade, so a new processor is in fashion. Like hemlines and boy bands, processors rise and fall in popularity. There was the RISC Age. Then the VLIW Era. The Decade of DSPs. Now, it’s all RISC-V.
There are plenty of reasons for RISC-V’s popularity, but here’s one I hadn’t expected: It’s not ARM. Or x86. Or even MIPS, SPARC, 8051, Clipper, PowerPC, or PDP/11. Among a certain class of customers, RISC-V is the processor of choice almost by default.