Since you haven’t said anything specific, it’s hard to interact with the comment without guessing at what you mean. But I’ll give it a go:

> generals refighting their previous war

Here I think you are talking about the risc vs cisc debate. It is true that in modern OOO cores this is basically meaningless. I think the only truly relevant piece is fixed encoding widths, which make wider decoders feasible on a lower power budget.

On the other hand I think risc-v owes a lot of its popularity to how easy it is to understand and implement a bare bones core. Marketing will be a huge challenge for any newcomer, but risc-v is doing very well on that score.

The place I think risc-v has made really good innovations in ISA design is in the vector extension. It seems to me that it allows for code to be written for larger vectors and the machine can apply whatever vector width it has available. I believe this should allow new cores to improve the performance of old code in a way that more explicit designs like AVX have struggled with.