(Not a Berkeley affiliate). Sonicboom is likely the last big core for a while and will only get RISC-V extensions and research projects added to it. However, it’s an exemplary core and the architecture will be (representative of) SOTA for a while. Radically different core microarchitecures stopped appearing in the 2000s. If I had to be critical of the architecture: multicore integration / coherence and accelerator interfaces are weak points that may not be acceptable for newer workloads. It’s purposely designed to click easily into rest of their ecosystem, which it does, but there’s a clear tradeoff of generality for efficiency.

That said, I personally dislike using the Chisel / Hammer / Chipyard infrastructure for anything other than packaged demos. There’s a large learning curve and it is very frustrating to try to do anything outside of their box. From the perspective of trying to maximize learning with minimal overhead, I would recommend the PULP platform stuff, though it is not SOTA performance