A large motivation for this move is likely to ensure that attempts by some incumbent ISAs to lobby the US government to curb the uptake of RISC-V are stymied.
There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
Then, there's NASA, and their rad hard HPSC RISC-V. It's a product now, with a Microchip part number (PIC64-HPSC1000-RH) and a second source (SiFive, apparently.) I suppose it's conceivable the a Berkeley CA developed ISA that has been officially adopted as new rad hard avionics CPU platform by the US government's primary aerospace arm could get voted off the island in some timeline, but it's looking fairly improbable at this point.
Only time will tell if it ends like: "to avoid someone else shooting us, let's shoot ourselves".
Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
> There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
An ISO standard is hard to gepolitically regulate, I would think.
It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous for folks to worry about it being turned into a strategic weapon.
Taking the previously mentioned ethernet example (not a perfect one I should accentuate again): why bother with blocking it's uptake when it is too fundamentally useful and enabling for a whole bunch of other innovation that builds on top.
I wonder why. Marketing? ISO tax mandatory to access some specific markets? That said, they should be careful on what they will pay in order to get an ISO stamp. And what parts of RISC-V will be covered... because RVA may probably get significant changes (after a while it may drop some hardware requirements which are kind of only here to help port from legacy ISA to RISC-V). Not to mention, it seems there are doubts about the core memory reservation over ZACAS and only designers of large and performant RISC-V implementations could answer that, and maybe this is a fluke.
It weirdly feels too early.
ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.
Government agencies like to take standards off the shelf whenever they can. Citing something overseen by an apolitical, non-profit organization avoids conflicts of interest (relative to the alternatives).
> “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”
Says that, but I don't agree with that. If anything it would have been less successful being picked up in discount markets if the specs weren't free for download, and I don't know what fringes they're trying to break into but probably none of them care whether the spec is ISO.
Usual lies. There are a plethora of largely ignored international standards. Making it an international standard is just one of many ways to achieve the wide worldwide acception and still has a high failure rate.
My take is that it could help tie up fragmentation. RISC-V has different profiles defining what instructions come with for different use cases like a general purpose OS, and enshrining them as an ISO standard would give the entire industry a rallying point.
Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees.
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
It ticks a checkbox. That's it. Some organizations and/or governments might have rules that emphasize using international standards, and this might help with it.
I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).
Not only that, it might turn RISC-V from a specification freely available under a FOSS license into a proprietary standard that you have to pay 285 CHF (~$350) to buy a non-transferable license for.
> The RISC-V ISA is already an industry standard and the next step is impartial recognition from a trusted international organization.
I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
ISO defines standards for much more than bolts and plugs. A few examples include: the C++ ISO standard, IT security standards and workplace safety standards, and that’s a small subset of what they do.
They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.
> It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
you my friend have not delved into the rabbithole that is standardisation organizations.
ISO and IEC goes so far beyond bolts and screws it's frankly dizzying how faar reaching their fingers are in our society.
As for why, the top comment explained it well; There is a movement to block Risk-v adoption in the US for some geopolitical shenanigans. A standardisation with a trusted authority may help.
FTA: “Since 1987, JTC 1 has overseen the standardization of many foundational IT standards, including JPEG, MPEG, and the C and C++ programming languages”
Compared to ISO, RISC-V International has almost no experience maintaining standards.
Even if you think that’s isn’t valuable, the reality is that there is prestige/trustworthiness associated with an “ISO standard” sticker, similar to how having a “published in prestigious journal J” stickers gives scientific papers prestige/trustworthiness.
They're excited about putting the spec behind a notoriously closed paywall??
Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.
The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.
There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]
I don't understand why they want to put the RISC-V spec behind the ISO paywall. It will just complicate the access to the standardized version to confirm compliance with it.
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There appears to be an undercurrent of this sort underway where the soaring popularity of RISC-V in markets such as China is politically ripe for some incumbent ISAs to turn US government opinion against RISC-V, from a general uptake PoV or from the PoV of introducing laborious procedural delays in the uptake.
Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Ethernet, although not directly relevant, is a similar example. You can't lobby the US government to outright ban or generally slow the adoption of Ethernet because it's so much of a universal phenomenon by virtue of it being a standard.
But yeah, the ISO standard doesn't hurt.
https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/pic64-hpsc1000
Dedicated consortiums like CNCF, USB Implementers Forum, Alliance for Open Media, IETF, etc are more qualified at moving a standard forward, than ISO or government bodies.
> Turning the ISA into an ISO standard helps curb such attempts.
Why do you think that would help? I fail to see how that would help.
It also cements the fact that the technology being standardized is simply too fundamental and likely ubiquitous for folks to worry about it being turned into a strategic weapon.
Taking the previously mentioned ethernet example (not a perfect one I should accentuate again): why bother with blocking it's uptake when it is too fundamentally useful and enabling for a whole bunch of other innovation that builds on top.
Is this real? Or FUD?
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
>> Is this real? Or FUD?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/risc-v-dese...
Somebody trying to influence Washington seems to want it shut down.
It weirdly feels too early.
ISO is often the source of feature creep in programming languages or massive bloat (mechanically favoring some vendors) in file formats. Namely, everything from ISO must be looked at in the details to see if it is 'clean'.
Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.
Random example I found at a glance: NIST recommending use of a specific ISO standard in domains not formally covered by a regulatory body: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
Of course this is a lie. But yes, governments like to claim that.
> “International standards have a special status,” says Phil Wennblom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1. “Even though RISC-V is already globally recognized, once something becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it’s even more widely accepted. Countries around the world place strong emphasis on international standards as the basis for their national standards. It’s a significant tailwind when it comes to market access.”
Without these profiles, we are stuck with memorizing a word soup of RV64GCBV_Zicntr_Zihpm_etc all means
“We’re standards compliant”
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
I just hope it's going to be a "throw it over the fence and standardize" type of a deal, where the actual standardization process will still be outside of ISO (the ISO process is not very good - not my words, just ask the members of the C++ committee) and the text of the standard will be freely licensed and available to everyone (ISO paywalls its standards).
Casual reminder that they ousted one of the founders of MPEG for daring to question the patent mess around H.265 (paraphrasing, a lot, of course)
I'm confused. Isn't RISC-V International itself a trusted international organization? It's hard to see how an organization that standardizes screws and plugs could possibly be qualified to develop ISAs.
They develop a well defined standard, not the technologies mentioned in the standard. So yes, they’re qualified.
you my friend have not delved into the rabbithole that is standardisation organizations.
ISO and IEC goes so far beyond bolts and screws it's frankly dizzying how faar reaching their fingers are in our society.
As for why, the top comment explained it well; There is a movement to block Risk-v adoption in the US for some geopolitical shenanigans. A standardisation with a trusted authority may help.
Compared to ISO, RISC-V International has almost no experience maintaining standards.
Even if you think that’s isn’t valuable, the reality is that there is prestige/trustworthiness associated with an “ISO standard” sticker, similar to how having a “published in prestigious journal J” stickers gives scientific papers prestige/trustworthiness.
Deleted Comment
Us older nerds will remember how Microsoft corrupted the entire ISO standardization process to ram down the Office Open XML (.docx/.xlsx/etc) unto the world.
The original Office ISO standard was 6000+ pages and basically declared unreproducible outside of Microsoft themselves.
There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to the kafkaesque byzantine nightmare that was that standardization. [0]
ISO def lacks luster, and maybe even relevance.
[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...