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For someone who has no idea what RISC-V is but loves making things with Arduino, what new things could I do with this?
by andkon 10y ago
For someone who has no idea what RISC-V is but loves making things with Arduino, what new things could I do with this?
- 56245623456 10y agoI think the RISC-V is way faster, otherwise you probably won't have any advantage, except knowing that the whole ISA is opensource in contrast to AVR chips.
- dmitrygr 10y agoIt promises to maybe be faster. Has no internal flash, cannot be bought in volume if you intend to actually make anything, has a very immature toolchain, and currently is a theory only.
- ajross 10y agoThese SiFive folks claim to have working silicon, there are what look like some power measurements on their site, and there are photographs of boards available for a claimed ship date in ~3 weeks. It's not in my hands personally, but they seem to be over the vapor hump. I found it an exciting enough product to drop $60 on, anyway.
- mastax 10y agoYour disclaimers are fair in that if you want an Arduino, buy an Arduino. But if a 320 MHz anything is slower than a 24 MHz AVR then the sky is falling.
- iammyIP 10y agoThe RISC-V seems to have it's focus on being open and being simple, not so much on being the fastest. The specs are only 130 pages. https://riscv.org/risc-v-foundation/ https://riscv.org/risc-v-foundation/ https://riscv.org/specifications/ https://riscv.org/specifications/
- monocasa 10y agoIt's a simple ISA, but built to be fast. It's specifically designed to map well to OoO cores at the slight expense of some features on in order cores that give you little boosts (like branch delay slots and other exposed pipeline features). Last I saw, BOOM compared very well to other OoO cores at the same gate count.
- userbinator 10y agoIf anything I think RISC-V is repeating the same mistakes as MIPS and the original RISCs, by being far too simple and requiring much greater fetch bandwidth in the process. The performance of MIPS, which it is closest to, has never really been considered anything more than "acceptable". It loses to ARM (which isn't so RISC-y anyway) and x86, so I expect RISC-V to be about the same: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-sho... http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/AverageEnergy.png http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Averag... Compared to an 8-bit AVR in an Arduino it's definitely much faster, but compared to other 32-bit architectures, it is not.
- ajross 10y agoIt's a much more capable device. The existing RISC-V instances (I don't know much about SiFive's offering per se, I'm just reading off their datasheet) are more comparable to ARM Cortex-M parts -- running in the dozens to hundreds of MHz, with an MMU and a real OS kernel (Linux, obviously, though surely there are BSD ports in the works). Hardware has, in addition to the GPIO, UART and ADC/DAC that you're used to from Atmel, a USB 2.0 device controller (it says "OTG", which implies a host controller too, but sometimes people get this mixed up), a SD/MMC/eMMC controller for storage (no idea about SDIO) and gigabit ethernet. I'm a little disappointed in the lack of wireless connectivity on the SoC, though I suppose you can make up for that with off the shelf USB devices (or a UART bluetooth radio).
- mSparks 10y agoThat sounds like these boards are getting to the point they can handle decent audio/signal throughput. But I don't see anything about usb or adc/dac on the site?
- noselasd 10y agoIf you want an arduino compatible device that can do audio processing, go for a Teensy board (https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/ , http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html)
- mSparks 10y ago72/120MHz isn't really enough to do "decent" audio/signal processing with low distortion. You can probably get it to work with a lot of effort and optimisation, but there'll be very little room to do anything with it afterwards. Afaik AC97 chips run at around 24MHz, are dedicated to the job, and even they stop at 20 bit resolution and sticking the data onto a data bus. Getting better than that is "hard", which is why all the manufacturers pretty much standardised around such a low standard.
- 10y ago
- fuzzythinker 10y agoAgree, for some who has no idea what RISC-V is, which I'm guessing is more than 50% of visitors, the "why" on the page needs to sell me on why RISC-V is better or at least better for certain things.
- wolfgke 10y agoI rather believe that if you don't know what RISC-V is, you simply are not the audience.
- kristianp 10y agoThen you're not fulfilling your potential for new people to enter that audience: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- wyager 10y agoIf you aren't interested in architecture, there's probably no particular reason for you to buy this at this point. RISC-V is just getting started, so there aren't huge practical benefits yet. In the long run, we'd obviously prefer to use open-source unencumbered hardware, which is the point of the RISC-V project.
- cestith 10y agoIf RISC-V really takes off and you're a first mover writing the low-level stuff for it then the early mover advantage is a good investment.
- BuuQu9hu 10y agohttps://youtu.be/QTYiH1Y5UV0 https://youtu.be/QTYiH1Y5UV0
- fuzzythinker 10y agoThank you, the video is very informative. Link should definitely be on the site.
- rwmj 10y agoRISC-V is an open source ISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V It has a number of implementations, both fully open source ones (BSD licensed), and proprietary. This one is based on the open source Rocket Chip implementation (https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket), which is a simple in-order design, something like ARM Cortex-M or Intel Atom. (There is also one open source out-of-order design called BOOM - https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom)