There’s a lot more to a computer than just a CPU or instruction set, and it’s borderline negligent for these companies to avoid developing standards for the surrounding ecosystem. RISC-V was initially guilty of this too, but I think they’re finally coming around and publishing some guidelines for what the rest of a RISC-V computer should look like.

I miss the days of standardized I/O ports, BIOS interrupts and memory-mapped devices at published addresses. Now, with ACPI, you practically need to run an entire VM in kernel to figure out what’s connected, and the complexity of drivers makes it very difficult for the hobbyist to interact directly with hardware.