But in the case of ARM, you _do_ know, if you manufacture it yourself. ARM licenses intellectual property, not sells chips. Once you buy a license, you can inspect it and make sure it doesn’t have the bits you don’t like.
That means I have to develop all the code from scratch anyway. the arch lic just gets me a ISA spec doc.Might as well start with another ISA that is free. But the issue is bigger. Shakti is also an exercise in using a high level HDL. We would not exist but for Bluespec, we really get a 6x to 10x productivity increase over Verilog. I also get the ability to do true formal proving of the correctness of my code. There is a reason why DARPA hose bluespec for their secure processor work.
