RISC-V: They should have known better

RISC-V's architectural design attempting to serve all computing use cases—from supercomputers to microcontrollers—is fundamentally flawed, as it cannot simultaneously optimize for conflicting requirements like high-end performance and extreme code density. For embedded microcontroller applications where RISC-V was positioned to compete, the ISA's interrupt handling overhead (44+ cycles) significantly underperforms mature alternatives like ARM Cortex-M0 (27 cycles), forcing vendors to implement non-standard extensions that fragment the ecosystem. This architectural inflexibility and fragmentation pose strategic risks for organizations evaluating RISC-V adoption, requiring careful assessment of workload-specific trade-offs rather than treating it as a universal ISA solution.