What's the elevator pitch for RISC-V? My intuition is that RISC was dead for good reason.

Dead simple base ISA and easily extensible means it's an obvious choice if you want a custom processor with your own custom instructions.

Scalable so the same ISA (with/without certain extensions) can be used from the smallest microprocessor to high end CPUs.

Compressed instructions gives very high code density (and unlike ARM Thumb doesn't require weird mode switching and is available for 64-bit ISA)

It's not the first popular open ISA. There was OpenRISC before it, but it was fatally flawed (branch delay slots). So RISC-V is arguably the first good popular open ISA.

erk__

There is also OpenPOWER (under the Linux foundation) which I assume is also good?

Or is RISC-V stictly better than it?

classichasclass

I have several OpenPOWER systems, including the POWER9 I use as my usual desktop. Besides IBM and other server manufacturers like Tyan and Wistron, you can get them as Raptor workstations and servers.

If you want an OpenPOWER design to play with, look at Microwatt ( https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt ) which is complete enough to boot Linux.