There's been a lot of debate in RVI about changing the naming scheme, because it's perceived (wrongly, I think) that putting a year in the name makes the profile seem obsolete already. Unfortunately the alternative suggestions so far have not been very well received.
A) Numbers in instruction set extensions tend to indicate the bit width, thus my confusion.
B) If you do later want to introduce wider instructions, its going to be confusing.
C) Software moved away from whole integer numbering for a reason. is RVA25 a completely new instruction set, a bug fix, or a superset of RVA23? RVA 1.1 or RVA 2.0 gives you more of a clue as to what youre dealing with.
D) Come 2100 and RVA00 we are going to have numerous issues with software checking that 'RVA >= 23'. I would like this one to be humourous, but unfortunately, experience shows it probably wont be.
A,B) yeah thats actually unfortunate with 23, but shouldn't be a problem in the future.
C,D) The current naming scheme is RVAxx where xx is increased for every major profile update, one that adds new mandatory extensions. Minor releases are RVAxx.y (iirc) which don't change mandated features but may allow more optional extension. The profiles are supposed to be backwards compatible, and will have a slow release cadence. The increment isn't fixed, but it's still unlikely we'll run out of two digit names. Regardless, if we ever are at RVA70, it's trivial to preserve ordering by going to something like RVA710 next.
