Back in the day, SiFive had a RV32 core that could fit in an Artix-7 that was pretty bare-bones. IO was random, it couldn't use the onboard DRAM, etc. It would be cool to see an officially supported RV32 softcore on an Artix-7. I had reasonably good experiences with the MicroBlaze back in the day, but would never think of using it for anything other than testing or education 'cause it was (very) closed source. And while I'm not the worlds biggest RISC-V cheerleader, this is the kind of thing that it's good at: "here's a tool that uses an ISA you may have already invested in. also, we're not going to try to lock you in to THAT side of the toolchain." I'm somewhat okay with AMD/Xilinx locking you in to whatever is underneath the ISA since you're probably going to have to pay for hardware somehow: either buying the FPGA or buying a catalog part (if they ever emerge.)

Also... thx for pointing out AMD bought Xilinx. I had completely forgotten about it and was mildly surprised to see AMD adopting MicroBlaze.