The ratification of the RVA23 profile for RISC-V marks a monumental moment for the architecture, and anyone who’s been following RISC-V knows that this isn’t just a checkbox.
RVA23 is a long-overdue unification of the instruction set architecture (ISA) that effectively gives RISC-V the structure it needs to compete with giants like Arm and x86 – without the legacy bloat or licensing headaches.
This standard lays out a consistent set of ISA extensions that software developers can rely on across RISC-V hardware, which is no small feat considering RISC-V’s open source DNA invites a potentially messy degree of fragmentation.
