I think David Chisnall's article is very good. However I don't think you should oversell the few issues with RISC-V. There are definitely some design mistakes, but overall it is good. I would say as good as ARM (but not as mature yet).
Also... consider how successful an insane instruction set like x86 is! The ISA definitely matters for performance, but it clearly doesn't matter that much.
Also the uniformity of the ISA is very nice for compilers. Sure in practice you're only ever going to use x1 or x5 for your return address but adding the hard constraint that you can only use those is definitely going to complicate some software.
I'm not sure what you mean about fighting fragmentation. I used to think that but I didn't know about the RVA profiles.
Indeed, I think he's repeating something that is today outdated information. With RVA profiles, we know what desktop-class RISC-V looks like, and that's what people might compare against ARM.
Also... consider how successful an insane instruction set like x86 is! The ISA definitely matters for performance, but it clearly doesn't matter that much.
Also the uniformity of the ISA is very nice for compilers. Sure in practice you're only ever going to use x1 or x5 for your return address but adding the hard constraint that you can only use those is definitely going to complicate some software.
I'm not sure what you mean about fighting fragmentation. I used to think that but I didn't know about the RVA profiles.