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>You'll hear a lot of people insist that ISA doesn't matter; they're provably clueless.

One of them being Torvalds, the transmeta guy (also known for Git, and a couple other hobby projects)

Now I tend to fall on your side of this argument, but I have to say I'd like to see the formal proof of cluelessness :)

Having read previous iterations of the same arguments, I've yet to see anything quite that decisive.




On ISA design, it is just so wrong to endorse the opinion of a single person. ISA design has three significant parties of interest: IC designers, compiler authors, and software developers.

No one can master these three fields all at once. No one. Not even Linus (who would be a master software developer + a decent compiler specialist).


>One of them being Torvalds, the transmeta guy (also known for Git, and a couple other hobby projects)

A very capable person no doubt, but also one that's well-known to be wrong[0] about topics he is not an expert at.

0. https://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~clausen/PVSE2006/linus-rebuttal....


Jim Keller has said ISA doesn't really matter beyond something like 15 necessary extensions.


Same Jim Keller has great things to say about RISC-V.

Which, by the way, includes mention of much attention these few important instructions (not extensions) got.




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