Ask HN: Is Spectre just as likely with RISC-V?

Ask HN: Is Spectre just as likely with RISC-V?
3 by blitmap | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I am very unrelated to CPU design. There are a lot of us hoping RISC-V will be in our future computers. As I understand it, processors from AMD and Intel are quite liberal with the x86 instruction set. They [can] act like complex virtual machines which re-order and tentatively execute later instructions against known data in the hopes this will be used (if the right branch is taken). This can offer better performance, but the issue is information being leaked unintentionally when that path isn't taken. 1) Would we be in the same boat with RISC-V? 2) Are RISC-V processors even "there yet"? Are there RISC-V processors currently doing speculative execution? 3) Is there anything in the RISC-V spec that makes something like Spectre less likely to happen? Does the RISC-V instruction set lend itself in some way to make Spectre less possible? A [believed] benefit of RISC-V is that with a reduced instruction set, things become easier to reason about. 4) Is speculative execution even a goal for RISC-V? Can a reduced instruction set offer optimization opportunities that make speculative execution not worth the risk? Can RISC-V be competitive without it? ( much speculation here ) Again, I am very uninformed. I think we'd be in the same situation but I thought I'd ask. (Thank you for entertaining my hypothetical?)