A large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied.
There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
topspin 3 days ago [-]
Then, there's NASA, and their rad hard HPSC RISC-V. It's a product now, with a Microchip part number (PIC64-HPSC1000-RH) and a second source (SiFive, apparently.) I suppose it's conceivable the a Berkeley CA developed ISA that has been officially adopted as new rad hard avionics CPU platform by the US government's primary aerospace arm could get voted off the island in some timeline, but it's looking fairly improbable at this point.
But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.
baaron 3 days ago [-]
For anyone else who thought this was simply a rad chip, it's radiation hardened
Only time will tell if it ends like: "to avoid someone else shooting us, let's shoot ourselves".
Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
Someone 3 days ago [-]
> There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
fork-bomber 3 days ago [-]
An ISO standard is hard to gepolitically regulate, I would think.
It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous for folks to worry about it being turned into a strategic weapon.
Taking the previously mentioned ethernet example (not a perfect one I should accentuate again): why bother with blocking it's uptake when it is too fundamentally useful and enabling for a whole bunch of other innovation that builds on top.
Someone 2 days ago [-]
You can’t (easily) make a standard go away but being a standard doesn’t stop anyone from making it illegal to use.
> It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous
Why do you think everything with an ISO standard is even remotely fundamental? There is an ISO standard for M/MUMPS (https://www.iso.org/standard/29268.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS, for example, but I wouldn’t call it fundamental. Some systems would break if MUMPS became illegal, but fundamental requires more, IMO.
phendrenad2 3 days ago [-]
> attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V
Is this real? Or FUD?
3 days ago [-]
3 days ago [-]
phkahler 3 days ago [-]
>> > attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V
> The risks aren’t theoretical. A new report found that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, has been responsible for producing malicious code in roughly half the sensitive cybersecurity incidents analyzed on GitHub. If China is willing to leverage open software in ways that harm global security, why would we assume open-source hardware will be treated differently?
> A single compromised RISC-V chip in a power grid, data center or weapons system could hand Beijing a quiet path into critical infrastructure. The more these chips spread, the greater the odds a vulnerability becomes a weapon.
I think the concern here is more with the implementations (coming out of China) than the instruction set itself. Or perhaps if there is some Verilog/VHDL code out there with backdoors, and that then gets baked into chips.
chithanh 2 days ago [-]
> I think the concern here is more with the implementations (coming out of China) than the instruction set itself.
Yes that is the pretense, but what they actually want to block is RISC-V adoption.
It's a bit similar to car industry opposition to right to repair, they ran TV ads claiming dangers for safety and security if independent repair were allowed. Louis Rossmann did a series of videos on this.
fork-bomber 3 days ago [-]
Thanks. That's exactly the kind of subliminal lobbying that I was alluding to. I don't think it's FUD at all.
sylware 3 days ago [-]
I wonder why. Marketing? ISO tax mandatory to access some specific markets? That said, they should be careful on what they will pay in order to get an ISO stamp. And what parts of RISC-V will be covered... because RVA may probably get significant changes (after a while it may drop some hardware requirements which are kind of only here to help port from legacy ISA to RISC-V). Not to mention, it seems there are doubts about the core memory reservation over ZACAS and only designers of large and performant RISC-V implementations could answer that, and maybe this is a fluke.
It weirdly feels too early.
ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.
axblount 4 days ago [-]
What's the advantage of standardizing through ISO/IEC? Better adoption in industry?
Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.
ryukoposting 4 days ago [-]
Government agencies like to take standards off the shelf whenever they can. Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives).
It's impossible to take ISO seriously after the .docx fiasco.
noir_lord 3 days ago [-]
That’s the definition of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Is ISO as an organisation imperfect sometimes (as in the docs case) sure?, it’s composed of humans who are generally flawed creatures, is it generally a good solution despite that?, also sure.
They’ve published tens of thousands off standards over 70 plus years that are deeply important to multiple industries so disregarding them because Microsoft co-opted them once 20 odd years ago seems unreasonable to me.
hofrogs 3 days ago [-]
What .docx fiasco?
lifthrasiir 3 days ago [-]
Office Open XML, the standard behind .docx and other zipped XML formats, was fast-tracked into the international standard without many rounds of reviews (by the same JTC 1!).
marcosdumay 3 days ago [-]
> Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives).
Of course this is a lie. But yes, governments like to claim that.
jcelerier 4 days ago [-]
As the article says:
> “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”
veltas 4 days ago [-]
Says that, but I don't agree with that. If anything it would have been less successful being picked up in discount markets if the specs weren't free for download, and I don't know what fringes they're trying to break into but probably none of them care whether the spec is ISO.
rjsw 3 days ago [-]
That can depend on how the spec gets made into an ISO standard. There is a process called "harvesting" that can allow the original author to continue to distribute an existing specification independently of ISO.
jcelerier 3 days ago [-]
> Says that, but I don't agree with that
I guess you just never had to fill in a grant application where you have to justify that you are using official standards so that you can get money
veltas 3 days ago [-]
I'm guessing in those kinds of situations it doesn't matter about the arch given x86 and ARM also aren't ISO standards. The manufacturers however should comply with relevant quality standards.
jcelerier 2 days ago [-]
it doesn't matter when there is no ISO standard for a given tech. But as soon as there is one, then you have to provide arguments as to "why didn't you use the standard".
lifthrasiir 3 days ago [-]
Usual lies. There are a plethora of largely ignored international standards. Making it an international standard is just one of many ways to achieve the wide worldwide acception and still has a high failure rate.
6SixTy 4 days ago [-]
My take is that it could help tie up fragmentation. RISC-V has different profiles defining what instructions come with for different use cases like a general purpose OS, and enshrining them as an ISO standard would give the entire industry a rallying point.
Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
justahuman74 4 days ago [-]
riscv was already gaining a profile mechanism outside of ISO, for example 'RVA23' is a known set of extensions
pjmlp 3 days ago [-]
Hardly, see programming languages standards and compiler specific extensions.
aDyslecticCrow 3 days ago [-]
languages are more fluid than processor architectures. I don't think they can be compared.
pjmlp 3 days ago [-]
One would think, yet welcome to enterprise consulting, especially customers whose main business is not selling software.
You will find fossilized languages all over the place.
aDyslecticCrow 3 days ago [-]
fossilised is often desirable or requested in some industries. Developing for the embedded market myself, we often have to stick to C99 to ensure compatibility with whatever ancient compiler a costumer or even chipset vendor may still be running.
snvzz 4 days ago [-]
RISC-V never had a fragmentation problem, thanks to the profiles.
IshKebab 3 days ago [-]
I wouldn't say it never had a problem, but the profiles are definitely a reasonable solution.
However even with profiles there are optional extensions and a lot of undefined behaviour (sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the spec is just not especially well written).
snvzz 3 days ago [-]
The FUD keeps being brought up, but the solution here was in place before the potential issue could manifest.
It started with G, later retroactively named RVA20 (with a minor extra extension that nobody ever skipped implementing), then RVA22 and now RVA23. All application processor implementations out there conform to a profile, and so do the relevant Linux distributions.
Of course, in embedded systems where the vendor controls the full stack, the freedom of micromanaging which extensions to implement as well as the freedom to add custom extensions is actual value.
The original architects of the ISA knew what they were doing.
boredatoms 4 days ago [-]
Maybe it helps get government contracts
“We’re standards compliant”
chithanh 2 days ago [-]
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees.
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
userbinator 4 days ago [-]
It's not like ARM and x86 are standardised by ISO either.
miki123211 4 days ago [-]
Governments seem to care about "self-sufficiency" a lot more these days, especially after what's happening in both China and the US right now.
If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.
Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.
lambdaone 3 days ago [-]
This is exactly what makes this such an interesting development. Standardization is part of the process of the CPU industry becoming a mature industry not dependent on the whims of individual companies. Boring, yes, but also stable.
aDyslecticCrow 3 days ago [-]
Yes, and they're both massively debated and criticised, to the point that the industry developed Risk-V in the firstplace. Not to mention the rugpull licensing ARM pulled a few years back.
eru 4 days ago [-]
Yes, but if 30 years ago ARM had an ISO standard they could point to, that would have probably helped with government adoption?
(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)
userbinator 4 days ago [-]
Relatedly, 30 years ago someone attempted to turn the Windows 3.1 API into an ISO standard:
Well, Wine shows that Win32 is the only stable ABI, even on Linux.
GoblinSlayer 3 days ago [-]
>On May 5, 1993, Sun Microsystems announced Windows Application Binary Interface (WABI), a product to run Windows software on Unix, and the Public Windows Interface (PWI) initiative, an effort to standardize a subset of the popular 16-bit Windows APIs.
>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs
Looks like that's what it was.
signa11 4 days ago [-]
they are de-facto…
kouteiheika 4 days ago [-]
It ticks a checkbox. That's it. Some organizations and/or governments might have rules that emphasize using international standards, and this might help with it.
I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).
kmeisthax 4 days ago [-]
> the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee
Casual reminder that they ousted one of the founders of MPEG for daring to question the patent mess around H.265 (paraphrasing, a lot, of course)
thebeardisred 4 days ago [-]
This allows RISC-V international to propose their standards as ISO/IEC standards.
pjmlp 3 days ago [-]
Not sure if this is a good idea given how ISO has been going for programming languages.
maxloh 3 days ago [-]
Yeah. I think the ISO process would likely slow down the development of the ISA.
muvlon 3 days ago [-]
Not only that, it might turn RISC-V from a specification freely available under a FOSS license into a proprietary standard that you have to pay 285 CHF (~$350) to buy a non-transferable license for.
aleatorianator 3 days ago [-]
ah, yes. OPEN like science or AI
charcircuit 3 days ago [-]
Why ISO? Why not somewhere that will allow people to read the standard for free?
usamoi 3 days ago [-]
> The RISC-V ISA is already an industry standard and the next step is impartial recognition from a trusted international organization.
I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
BlobberSnobber 3 days ago [-]
ISO defines standards for much more than bolts and plugs. A few examples include: the C++ ISO standard, IT security standards and workplace safety standards, and that’s a small subset of what they do.
They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.
usamoi 3 days ago [-]
But isn't RISC-V just a standard? ISO will decide what is RISC-V and what isn't. Then its complicated process will become an obstacle to innovation.
tester756 3 days ago [-]
C++ "standard" sounds more like an example of why technology should avoid standards
112233 3 days ago [-]
Titanic is not an example of why building ships has to be avoided. C++ is a great example, yes, of the damage ambitious and egotistical personas can inflict when cooperation is necessary.
3 days ago [-]
tialaramex 3 days ago [-]
It is certainly an example of why SC22 is a bad idea
The "C++ Standards Committee" is Working Group #21 of Sub Committee #22, of the Joint Technical Committee #1 between ISO and the IEC.
It is completely the wrong shape of organization for this work, a large unwieldy bureaucracy created so that sovereign entities could somehow agree things, this works pretty well for ISO 216 (the A-series paper sizes) and while it isn't very productive for something like ISO 26262 (safety) it can't do much harm. For the deeply technical work of a programming language it's hopeless.
The IETF shows a much better way to develop standards for technology.
jcranmer 3 days ago [-]
The fact that the C++ committee is technically a subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup is among the least of the issues of ISO for standardization.
The main problem is that ISO is a net negative value-add for standardization. At one point, the ISO editor came back and said "you need to change the standard because you used periods instead of commas for the decimal point, a violation of ISO rules." Small wonder there's muttering about taking C and C++ out of ISO.
tialaramex 3 days ago [-]
I would argue that the structural problem is an underlying cause. So it won't be the proximate cause, but when you dig deeper, when you keep asking like a five year old, "But why?" the answer is ultimately ISO's structure and nothing to do with Bjarne's language in particular.
Hence the concern for the non-language but still deeply technical RISC-V standardization.
usrnm 3 days ago [-]
Say what you will about C++, but it is undoubtedly one of the most successful and influential programming languages in history.
high_na_euv 3 days ago [-]
By which metric?
C, Java, Rust, JS, C# do exist
nutjob2 3 days ago [-]
> influential
It's certainly a cautionary tale
actionfromafar 3 days ago [-]
If we are taking cheap potshots, there's a standard for standards: https://xkcd.com/927/ or in the proposed XKCD URI form xkcd://927
aDyslecticCrow 3 days ago [-]
> It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
you my friend have not delved into the rabbithole that is standardisation organizations.
ISO and IEC goes so far beyond bolts and screws it's frankly dizzying how faar reaching their fingers are in our society.
As for why, the top comment explained it well; There is a movement to block Risk-v adoption in the US for some geopolitical shenanigans. A standardisation with a trusted authority may help.
Someone 3 days ago [-]
FTA: “Since 1987, JTC 1 has overseen the standardization of many foundational IT standards, including JPEG, MPEG, and the C and C++ programming languages”
Compared to ISO, RISC-V International has almost no experience maintaining standards.
Even if you think that’s isn’t valuable, the reality is that there is prestige/trustworthiness associated with an “ISO standard” sticker, similar to how having a “published in prestigious journal J” stickers gives scientific papers prestige/trustworthiness.
3 days ago [-]
intsunny 3 days ago [-]
They're excited about putting the spec behind a notoriously closed paywall??
Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.
The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.
There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]
I don't understand why they want to put the RISC-V spec behind the ISO paywall. It will just complicate the access to the standardized version to confirm compliance with it.
childintime 3 days ago [-]
I'd wish they'd write a test suite or certification program instead.. Those ISO standard documents are nowadays better parseable with a chatbot, but they are still the wrong language for the job.
It would be very cool to run the compiled code developed in an ISO/IEC-standardized language on an ISO/IEC-standardized CPU. It might even be standard-compliant.
darksaints 4 days ago [-]
Are there any promising core designs yet? Multi-core designs? Any promising extensions being standardized?
I really want to believe, but I don't think we'll see anything like an M5 chip anytime soon simply because there's so little investment from the bigger players.
IshKebab 3 days ago [-]
Yeah Rivos apparently taped out a high performance server class core (probably only a test chip I'd guess) before Meta bought them.
There are plenty of multi core designs (that's easy) but they aren't very fast.
In terms of open source XiangShan is the most advanced as far as I know. It's fairly high performance out-of-order.
I don't think there's anything M5-level and probably won't be for a while (it took ARM decades so it's not a failing). I doubt we'll see any serious RISC-V laptops because there probably isn't demand (maybe Chromebooks though?). More likely to see phones and servers because Android is supporting RISC-V, and servers run Linux.
In terms of extensions I think it's pretty much all there. Probably it needs some kind of extension to make x86 emulation fast, like Apple did. The biggest extension I know of that isn't ratified is the P packed SIMD one but I don't know if there's much demand for that outside of DSPs.
snvzz 4 days ago [-]
Tenstorrent has announced Ascalon development boards TBA 2026Q2.
That's not gonna beat the M5, but it should be similar or better relative to M1, and a huge performance jump for RISC-V.
panick21 2 days ago [-]
This likely makes sense because of some regulatory frameworks that require 'offical' standards.
jgord 4 days ago [-]
busywork ... but maybe good marketing - people somehow believe that ISO has some relationship to quality.
kazinator 4 days ago [-]
People with absolutely no technical clue who only know "ISO 9001" equate "ISO" with quality initiatives and certifications.
What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability.
ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions.
If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium.
That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.
IshKebab 3 days ago [-]
> is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions
I doubt it - the ISO standard will still allow custom extensions.
Joel_Mckay 4 days ago [-]
A standard 64bit+DSP RISC-V would go a long way for undoing the fragmentation damage caused by the "design by committee" implications.
..it was the same mistake that made ARM6 worse/more-complex than modern ARM7/8/9. =3
kazinator 4 days ago [-]
As if we have never seen design-by-committee damage coming from ISO?
ISO standards are often just a sign Process-people are in control =3
blurbleblurble 4 days ago [-]
Good marketing, this could open up more large investment into RISC-V.
Joel_Mckay 4 days ago [-]
Be honest, what does RISC-V offer that 10 year old AArch64 doesn't already provide?
RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
blurbleblurble 3 days ago [-]
What does <open source anything> offer that trusty old <proprietary burden> doesn't already provide?
Joel_Mckay 3 days ago [-]
I would agree for FPGA soft-cpu the RISC-V is an obvious choice.
But in general, the next question will be which version did you deploy, and which cross-compiler do you use. All the documentation people search will have caveats, or simply form contradictory guidance.
The problem isn't the ISA, but the ill fated trap of trying to hit every use-case (design variant fragmentation.) ARM 6 made the same mistake, and ARM8/9 greatly consolidated around the 64 bit core design.
Indeed, an ISO standard may help narrow the project scope, but I doubt it can save the designs given the behavior some of its proponents have shown. =3
Pet_Ant 3 days ago [-]
People complain about fragmentation, but I feel like they are missing the forest for the trees.
In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V.
I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others".
As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.
Joel_Mckay 3 days ago [-]
Sure, but what we saw was most software simply disabled the advanced vendor specific features in ARM, and still only compile for stable code around the core IP.
This is an important phenomena committee consensus couldn't reconcile. =3
Less legal risk, ARM has grown litigious and wants a bigger piece of the pie.
Joel_Mckay 3 days ago [-]
IP costs real money, and consumers usually don't care how people split up their pies.
100% of a small pie is worth far less than a slice from a large pie. I've met people that made that logical error, and it usually doesn't end well. =3
mrbluecoat 3 days ago [-]
While the sentiment is a bit harsh, the performance gap noted is real. RISC-V has a ways to go to catch up to ARM64 and then finally AMD64 but if the Apple M1 taught us anything, it's possible.
Joel_Mckay 3 days ago [-]
RISC-V shouldn't try to catch 40 years of spiral-development, but rather focus on something people can gather momentum around.
amd64 wasn't a great design, but provided a painless migration path for x86 developers to 64bit. Even Intel adopted this competitors architecture.
I like the company making a multi-core pseudo GPU card around RISC-V + DSP cores, but again copying NVIDIA bodged on mailbox style hardware is a mistake. It is like the world standardized around square-wheels as a latency joke or something... lol
Making low-volume bespoke silicon is a fools errand, and competing with a half-baked product for an established market is a failed company sooner or later.
I think people are confusing what I see with what I would like to see. An open ISA would be great, but at this point I can't even convince myself I'd buy a spool of such chips. =3
LarsKrimi 3 days ago [-]
RISC-V cemented their own deathsentence when they brought seasoned MIPS software developers into their fold early on.
The calling convention was botched, just like it had been for 10s of different MIPS ones
And it was hyperoptimized before there was existing silicon, just like the SysV AMD64 calling convention was fucked up by Suse developers before there was existing silicon
kilibe 3 days ago [-]
Congrats to RISC-V International on this pivotal milestone—being granted JTC 1 PAS Submitter status feels like the open ISA's official "welcome to the global stage." What strikes me most is how this isn't just procedural rubber-stamping; it's a deliberate reinforcement of RISC-V's ethos of transparency and collaboration, ensuring derivatives stay true while unlocking easier market access worldwide. In an era where AI and edge computing demand interoperable, royalty-free foundations, this could accelerate adoption in ways we've only dreamed of—imagine seamless RISC-V ecosystems spanning from Tokyo fabs to Silicon Valley startups.
veltas 4 days ago [-]
RISC-V has always been an ivory tower, with a lot of bad decisions they double down on. Not surprised they're rushing towards this outdated stamp of authority too.
snvzz 3 days ago [-]
>bad decisions they double down on.
Could you elaborate?
veltas 3 days ago [-]
No overflow/carry flag impacting safe overflow checking and bignum performance, the whole conditional move history and backpeddling and state of Zicond, the system for describing feature support is needlessly complicated and just a mess for users outside of embedded, the spec is written more like an academic paper than a CPU manual, vector instructions act like they're written for a coprocessor for some reason, bad frame pointer ABI support, etc.
GoblinSlayer 2 days ago [-]
>safe overflow checking
You mean rust? Rust uses unsigned integers for everything, they can be checked efficiently. Same for bignum.
Rendered at 18:48:11 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/pic64-hpsc1000
Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous for folks to worry about it being turned into a strategic weapon.
Taking the previously mentioned ethernet example (not a perfect one I should accentuate again): why bother with blocking it's uptake when it is too fundamentally useful and enabling for a whole bunch of other innovation that builds on top.
> It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous
Why do you think everything with an ISO standard is even remotely fundamental? There is an ISO standard for M/MUMPS (https://www.iso.org/standard/29268.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS, for example, but I wouldn’t call it fundamental. Some systems would break if MUMPS became illegal, but fundamental requires more, IMO.
Is this real? Or FUD?
>> Is this real? Or FUD?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/risc-v-dese...
Somebody trying to influence Washington seems to want it shut down.
From the article:
> The risks aren’t theoretical. A new report found that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm, has been responsible for producing malicious code in roughly half the sensitive cybersecurity incidents analyzed on GitHub. If China is willing to leverage open software in ways that harm global security, why would we assume open-source hardware will be treated differently?
> A single compromised RISC-V chip in a power grid, data center or weapons system could hand Beijing a quiet path into critical infrastructure. The more these chips spread, the greater the odds a vulnerability becomes a weapon.
I think the concern here is more with the implementations (coming out of China) than the instruction set itself. Or perhaps if there is some Verilog/VHDL code out there with backdoors, and that then gets baked into chips.
Yes that is the pretense, but what they actually want to block is RISC-V adoption.
It's a bit similar to car industry opposition to right to repair, they ran TV ads claiming dangers for safety and security if independent repair were allowed. Louis Rossmann did a series of videos on this.
It weirdly feels too early.
ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.
Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.
Random example I found at a glance: NIST recommending use of a specific ISO standard in domains not formally covered by a regulatory body: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
Is ISO as an organisation imperfect sometimes (as in the docs case) sure?, it’s composed of humans who are generally flawed creatures, is it generally a good solution despite that?, also sure.
They’ve published tens of thousands off standards over 70 plus years that are deeply important to multiple industries so disregarding them because Microsoft co-opted them once 20 odd years ago seems unreasonable to me.
Of course this is a lie. But yes, governments like to claim that.
> “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”
I guess you just never had to fill in a grant application where you have to justify that you are using official standards so that you can get money
Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
You will find fossilized languages all over the place.
However even with profiles there are optional extensions and a lot of undefined behaviour (sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the spec is just not especially well written).
It started with G, later retroactively named RVA20 (with a minor extra extension that nobody ever skipped implementing), then RVA22 and now RVA23. All application processor implementations out there conform to a profile, and so do the relevant Linux distributions.
Of course, in embedded systems where the vendor controls the full stack, the freedom of micromanaging which extensions to implement as well as the freedom to add custom extensions is actual value.
The original architects of the ISA knew what they were doing.
“We’re standards compliant”
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.
Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.
(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Programming_Interf...
It didn't become one, but it did become standardised as ECMA-234:
https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs
Looks like that's what it was.
I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).
Casual reminder that they ousted one of the founders of MPEG for daring to question the patent mess around H.265 (paraphrasing, a lot, of course)
I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.
The "C++ Standards Committee" is Working Group #21 of Sub Committee #22, of the Joint Technical Committee #1 between ISO and the IEC.
It is completely the wrong shape of organization for this work, a large unwieldy bureaucracy created so that sovereign entities could somehow agree things, this works pretty well for ISO 216 (the A-series paper sizes) and while it isn't very productive for something like ISO 26262 (safety) it can't do much harm. For the deeply technical work of a programming language it's hopeless.
The IETF shows a much better way to develop standards for technology.
The main problem is that ISO is a net negative value-add for standardization. At one point, the ISO editor came back and said "you need to change the standard because you used periods instead of commas for the decimal point, a violation of ISO rules." Small wonder there's muttering about taking C and C++ out of ISO.
Hence the concern for the non-language but still deeply technical RISC-V standardization.
C, Java, Rust, JS, C# do exist
It's certainly a cautionary tale
you my friend have not delved into the rabbithole that is standardisation organizations.
ISO and IEC goes so far beyond bolts and screws it's frankly dizzying how faar reaching their fingers are in our society.
As for why, the top comment explained it well; There is a movement to block Risk-v adoption in the US for some geopolitical shenanigans. A standardisation with a trusted authority may help.
Compared to ISO, RISC-V International has almost no experience maintaining standards.
Even if you think that’s isn’t valuable, the reality is that there is prestige/trustworthiness associated with an “ISO standard” sticker, similar to how having a “published in prestigious journal J” stickers gives scientific papers prestige/trustworthiness.
Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.
The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.
There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]
ISO def lacks luster, and maybe even relevance.
[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
Formal model: https://github.com/riscv/sail-riscv
I really want to believe, but I don't think we'll see anything like an M5 chip anytime soon simply because there's so little investment from the bigger players.
There are plenty of multi core designs (that's easy) but they aren't very fast.
In terms of open source XiangShan is the most advanced as far as I know. It's fairly high performance out-of-order.
I don't think there's anything M5-level and probably won't be for a while (it took ARM decades so it's not a failing). I doubt we'll see any serious RISC-V laptops because there probably isn't demand (maybe Chromebooks though?). More likely to see phones and servers because Android is supporting RISC-V, and servers run Linux.
In terms of extensions I think it's pretty much all there. Probably it needs some kind of extension to make x86 emulation fast, like Apple did. The biggest extension I know of that isn't ratified is the P packed SIMD one but I don't know if there's much demand for that outside of DSPs.
That's not gonna beat the M5, but it should be similar or better relative to M1, and a huge performance jump for RISC-V.
What people with a better clue sometimes wrongly equate ISO with is interoperability.
ISO standards can help somewhat. If you have ISO RISC V, then you can analyze a piece of code and know, is this strictly ISO RISV code, or is it using vendor extensions.
If an architecture is controlled by a vendor, or a consortium, we still know analogous things: like does the program conform to some version of the ISA document from the vendor/consortium.
That vendor has a lot of power to take it in new directions though without getting anyone else to sign off.
I doubt it - the ISO standard will still allow custom extensions.
..it was the same mistake that made ARM6 worse/more-complex than modern ARM7/8/9. =3
Have you heard of this C++ thing? :)
The STL was good, but Boost proved a phenomena...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
ISO standards are often just a sign Process-people are in control =3
RISC-V is still too green, and fragmented-standards always look like a clown car of liabilities to Business people. =3
But in general, the next question will be which version did you deploy, and which cross-compiler do you use. All the documentation people search will have caveats, or simply form contradictory guidance.
The problem isn't the ISA, but the ill fated trap of trying to hit every use-case (design variant fragmentation.) ARM 6 made the same mistake, and ARM8/9 greatly consolidated around the 64 bit core design.
Indeed, an ISO standard may help narrow the project scope, but I doubt it can save the designs given the behavior some of its proponents have shown. =3
In the past if you didn't find something you needed, you'd design your own. Now you just tweak RISC-V.
I mean "12 variants of RISC-V" is actually less fragmentation than "RISC-V and 11 others".
As long as there is a stable core to target, that is all that matters for main stream adoption, and profiles and distros are already there with RVA23.
This is an important phenomena committee consensus couldn't reconcile. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
100% of a small pie is worth far less than a slice from a large pie. I've met people that made that logical error, and it usually doesn't end well. =3
amd64 wasn't a great design, but provided a painless migration path for x86 developers to 64bit. Even Intel adopted this competitors architecture.
I like the company making a multi-core pseudo GPU card around RISC-V + DSP cores, but again copying NVIDIA bodged on mailbox style hardware is a mistake. It is like the world standardized around square-wheels as a latency joke or something... lol
Making low-volume bespoke silicon is a fools errand, and competing with a half-baked product for an established market is a failed company sooner or later.
I think people are confusing what I see with what I would like to see. An open ISA would be great, but at this point I can't even convince myself I'd buy a spool of such chips. =3
The calling convention was botched, just like it had been for 10s of different MIPS ones And it was hyperoptimized before there was existing silicon, just like the SysV AMD64 calling convention was fucked up by Suse developers before there was existing silicon
Could you elaborate?
You mean rust? Rust uses unsigned integers for everything, they can be checked efficiently. Same for bignum.