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Comment by opello | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure the "bespoke" tooling was just older versions of those industry standard tools because of poor upstreaming of architecture support. And there are probably many, very reasonable, justifications for that having been the case... the least of which is shipping toolchains with their own design tools.

RISC-V doesn't seem like the "strongest" ISA ecosystem, unless you mean among soft core CPUs?

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Strongest of any ISA after ARM and x86 at this stage, I should think.

I can't really see AMD/Xilinx or Intel/Altera offering a free 486SX soft core, even though they legally could. It would I expect use a lot more LUTs, and be slower.

Licensing Cortex-M1 doesn't seem likely either.

Beides that there are ARM softcores available on Xilinx...

https://www.arm.com/resources/free-arm-cortex-m-on-fpga

Among 32-bit microcontroller-class architectures, modern toolchain support for rv32imc is second only to armv7m IMHO. Nobody wants to maintain support for any other vendor-specific ISAs.

>unless you mean among soft core CPUs

Note that RISC-V hard cores in FPGAs are already a reality, including Microsemi PolarFire as well as GOWIN GW2N.

Not long from now, I expect every FPGA vendor to switch over. The ones that already offer soft cores won't take long.

>RISC-V doesn't seem like the "strongest" ISA ecosystem

RISC-V is rapidly building the strongest ecosystem.

It already is the strongest besides x86 and ARM, and the position of these two isn't, by any means, secure.

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