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0 pointsindolering5y ago0 comments

I think you understate the level of IP vetting RISC-V has undergone. All but 6 instructions in the RV32G instruction set could be found in implementations that were at least 20 years old; the remaining six were novel [1].

RISC-V owes MIPS about as much as MIPS owes Patterson. MIPS-V was already ~15 years old when RISC-V was first used in the classroom. RISC-V purposefully paired back the layers of marketing cruft and failed experiments that had grown over Patterson et al.'s original RISC architecture.

There is less confidence in the extensions, but as RISC-V turns 10 ... patent trolls had better hurry if they want to extort anyone based on the ISA alone.

[1]: https://live-risc-v.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

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brucehoult5y ago

Part of joining RISC-V International is signing a document irrevocably certifying that RISC-V doesn't infringe any of your patents, so that door is definitely closed for MIPS now anyway.

It is a little weird that there is an actual preference in proposing instructions for RISC-V extensions to demonstrate that the instruction was patented but the patent has expired, or at least that the instruction was publicly documented in some ISA at least a couple of decades ago.

By and large, RISC-V is not trying to be novel, but to bring together and simplify established best practice.

I did invent what is believed to be an entirely novel instruction for the RISC-V B extension: GORC. The other instruction GORC shares circuitry with, GREV, is also believed to not have been implemented in an ISA before, though it has been proposed in the literature.

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