There is <i>so</i> much to unpack in this article. I pick this claim: That RISC-V is a simple(r) architecture and therefore meaningfully easier to verify[0].<p>The base RISC-V ISA is indeed very small. However, to compete with ARM/MIPS/x86 usefully as an application core, one must include many standard extensions. All of which add comparable complexity to the ARM/MIPS feature which they ape. It feels wrong to assert then without some serious qualification that RISC-V is simpler or easier to verify. A RISC-V core is no more or less complex to verify than a comparably featured ARM/MIPS core.<p>That said, and open ISA like RISC-V can really lead the way in terms of shared verification IP. <i>That</i> is the benefit to an open ISA, not it's simplicity, but the fact that it becomes worthwhile for people to share their verification infrastructure. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much of this yet. riscv-formal is amazing, and the riscv-compliance suites are getting better, but proper constrained random stimulus generation and coverage collecton? Not yet, at least, not out there in the open source world.
I really wish that Western Digital had included their verification infrastructure when they open sourced Swerv [1].<p>Really enjoyed the article otherwise!<p>0 - A reasonable person might disagree this claim is being so explicitly made, but that's what I took from it.<p>1 - <a href="https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1</a>
> The limit of TDP led directly to the era of "dark silicon," whereby processors would slow on the clock rate and turn off idle cores to prevent overheating.<p>We used to do this in the 1990s with PHS cell phones in Japan: you certainly didn't need to listen to the microphone until a call was actually connected, and even then the caller might listen and not talk, so after connection you'd listen to the microphone but still not start up the voice compression chips until the noise got above a threshold (so a bit of the moshi moshi would get cut off -- no big deal).