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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

Point 2 claims that RISC-V is the dominant architecture used for teaching. The link provides no evidence for that. I know lots of unis teaching ARM, and none teaching RISC-V. Is there any evidence that RISC-V is the dominant architecture for teaching?

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Originally MIPS (or DLX) was the dominant architecture used for teaching computer architecture because the standard Computer Architecture textbook (by one of the main designers of MIPS, David Patterson [1] along with John L. Hennessy [2]) was used in most universities [3]. These two authors were basically the university-lead designers of the RISC philosophy. Patterson's team designed the RISC-I and RISC-II processors (Berkeley RISC [4]). Hennessy and his team designed the MIPS processors (Stanford MIPS [5]). This culmination eventually begot the RISC-V. So yeah, the RISC-V is now the dominant architecture used for teaching computer architecture as they now use RISC-V to teach computer architecture with their latest book edition [6]. Also for more information on that, read [7].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Patterson_(computer_scie...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Hennessy

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Jo...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_RISC

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_MIPS

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-RISC-V-A...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#History

It probably refers to digital design education, not software development education.

And it does seem like universities are rapidly starting to adopt the ISA for that purpose. A few years ago, those classes would use a custom instruction set written by a professor, or maybe a simple proprietary ISA like MSP430. I don't think ARM was very common.

For example, MIT used to teach computer design with an arbitrary CPU that they called "beta". Now they use RISC-V.

https://computationstructures.org/notes/pdfs/beta.pdf

https://6004.mit.edu/web/fall20/schedule

Almost all universities I know of have shifted to RISC V. UC Berkely, MIT any of the UC's,UW, even Harvey Mudd College. So it is not an unreasonable assertion.

From your list, this could be a US/UK separation.

I could give Indian universities too.

My UC (Santa Barbara) used MIPS in its computer architecture classes.

There’s almost no difference between the two as far as the undergrad level intro to computer architecture course is concerned.

Well, other than the fact that the ISA is different and MIPS has a couple of strange legacy quirks (branch delay slots?)

From what timeframe is your information?

I noticed a lot of institutions switching to Risc-V recently.

The simple core instruction set is very appealing for teaching. It makes implementing a full interpreter in a semester attainable.

Also compiling some C code and have students actually know/understand all instructions is a big win.

All while having access to open source and already solid tooling (compilers, emulators)

At least a lot of the "important" American ones seem to have switched. At my university we used Nios II which, while basically no one will directly use it in their lives, was good enough for learning assembly. It's all pretty transferable anyways.

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