It's a bummer that Intel doesn't do something more innovative. The whole industry is just not innovating, which is disappointing. There's nothing new or noteworthy about RISC-V – it's an extremely dated approach, and it's full of the arbitrary preferences of a handful of academics. It's not a scientific product, not the result of serious testing or simulation studies. I'm not even sure what it means for an instruction set to be "open source" or "free". I guess it could help implementers, but it doesn't help users. In fact, I'm not sure why well-funded teams feel the need to use someone else's instruction set at all. Why does Apple bother with Arm, when they could just create their own ISA optimized for their goals and products?
This all makes me wonder about the status of the Mill CPU and Rex Computing. The former is very innovative, and I expected Intel to either buy them or just move a lot faster with similar ideas. Rex is all about eliminating caches, for reasons I don't fully grok. They just have tiny scratchpad memories per core, and tons of cores. I think Peter Thiel had invested, but I didn't understand the point of it if they're announcing their approach to the world years before producing a product – couldn't Intel just move faster with the same basic ideas? Intel has vastly more engineers and scientists than a tiny startup, so it didn't make sense.
It would be neat if someone took a clean-sheet approach and designed an ISA from a rigorous process of instruction discovery and synthesis. It would start by asking something like "What instructions are most useful given basic assumptions about the tasks of computers and the physical constraints of silicon transistors?" You could reapproach energy use and various tradeoffs from scratch, and would probably discover some interesting opportunities.