On the one side all the users will need to prove their ID to access websites, and on the website side the site will have to ask permission to continue operating at ever increasing frequency.

That is the future we have walked into.

Being sitting ducks is the point.

The underlying reason is too many people will readily believe that if someone died for something it means it's worth fighting for, and this has been abused by strategists for a very long time.

The whole point of that noise is to put NATO + Japanese military in the Straits of Hormuz so that Israel and the US can continue to attack Iran with impunity. Any effort by Iran to shut the Straits in response to further attacks will hit some "innocent" party and drag them into the conflict.

It's basically bait for WW3, and luckily so far the EU particularly are not biting.

> RISC-V doesn't have the pitfalls of Sparc (register windows, branch delay slots),

You're saying ISA design does have implementation performance implications then? ;)

> There's no one that expects it'll be hard to optimize for

[Raises hand]

> There are at least 2 designs that have taped out in small runs and have high end performance.

Are these public?

Edit: I should add, I'm well aware of the cultural mismatch between HN and the semi industry, and have been caught in it more than a few times, but I also know the semi industry well enough to not trust anything they say. (Everything from well meaning but optimistic through to outright malicious depending on the company).

> RISC-V will get there, eventually.

Not trolling: I legitimately don't see why this is assumed to be true. It is one of those things that is true only once it has been achieved. Otherwise we would be able to create super high performance Sparc or SuperH processors, and we don't.

As you note, Arm once was fast, then slow, then fast. RISC-V has never actually been fast. It has enabled surprisingly good implementations by small numbers of people, but competing at the high end (mobile, desktop or server) it is not.