As the title states, this is a thread to converse about Open Source hardware without any NSA, FSB or Chinese backdoors. What options might we have in the future and what options are available at the moment that are fully auditable against government-imposed backdoors?
RISC-V is only an ISA though. The important part is the implementation. Someone can design a chipset that implements RISC-V but at the same time still has backdoors, undocumented instructions and requires proprietary firmware to boot. Likewise, someone could theoretically make a chipset that implements x86_64, has no backdoors and Just Works™ with libreboot.
RISC-V does not mean no backdoors or other spookiness. But a processor that is indeed void of such things is more likely going to be a RISC-V than an x86_64/ppc64/aarch64/etc. since RISC-V is a free ISA that anyone can use.
correct, but a company can make it not have spookyness if they wanted to.