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In the beginning, the main commercial interest in RISC-V, is as an internal MCU core which is not customer-programmable. In my previous job, we used an OpenRISC
by audunw 10y ago
In the beginning, the main commercial interest in RISC-V, is as an internal MCU core which is not customer-programmable. In my previous job, we used an OpenRISC core, and it was awful. If I didn't quit I would have made a very strange push for developing a simple RISC-V core, at least once the compressed ISA was finalized.
It's very simple to make a small and efficient RISC-V core in-house, and if that means we can avoid paying a huge amount of money to ARM, that's fantastic. For some products (radio microcontrollers), it's possible that RISC-V will live alongside ARM for a while. Maybe if RISC-V is lucky, semiconductor companies will start to allow customers to program the RISC-V core, and that creates an opening to take on ARM. All it takes is one big customer that says "we are willing to take the hit in debugging and development tooling, in order to save a few cents in ARM licenses on this chip"
You can kind of see ARM positioning themselves for this reality as well. They are branching out into a lot of different areas in order to stay relevant. They've invested massively in debugging IPs and are now investing in architectures for more secure CPUs/MCUs (TrustZone). They have GPU cores, DSP extensions, etc.
Over time, the market for "plain, dumb 32-bit MCU cores" will definitely be taken over by some open source, royalty free solution.
- xuejie 10y agoThis is indeed an awesome answer(thanks for that!) but my question is: is ARM really so ahead in terms of debugging and tooling? I ask because in my experience dealing with current ARM-based boards, the development experience is, let's just say less optimal. So is there any chance we might actually see better debugging experience in RISC-V when the openness attracts more users, or is this really a hardware company's task to solve?
- chrsw 10y agoCan you explain what you mean by "Maybe if RISC-V is lucky, semiconductor companies will start to allow customers to program the RISC-V core"?
- xemdetia 10y agoAs far as I am aware if you license ARM you are not just getting the information to put an ARM core with an ARM instruction set in your system, you can also add custom instructions to access custom silicon that's in the same package (I think the Wii did that to an extent with their DRM). That way you can add your own very high performance and specialized extensions that might normally end up being separate custom silicon IC's. Compare this to the generally available RISC-V cores which would be not specialized towards some end but allow you to program them as a more general device cooperating with a larger system. This I feel is more apparent in SoC circumstances.
- rhubarbquid 10y ago> I would have made a very strange push for developing a simple RISC-V core I assume that's just a typo/autocorrect, but it makes for a hilarious mental image