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Nice. That's a big improvement in price over the previous ones. I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market o
by problems 9y ago
Nice. That's a big improvement in price over the previous ones.
I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86 CPUs?
In the microcontroller market there's a lot of competition right now, especially with devices like the ESP32 going for $8 with wifi and bluetooth.
- jhgb 9y agoI haven't studied it in detail but my mental picture of RISC-V is it being an attempt at a modern, clean, patent-unencumbered ISA suitable for use from microcontrollers to large systems. The suitability progress in this effort may naturally be uneven (low-power microcontrollers with "straightforward" basic implementations would be usable long before large SMP servers with wide out-of-order cores and powerful atomics and IPC features, for example). At this point, it would be very lovely and educational to see an Oberon system (http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/) ported to these small boards. (It could definitely use more memory to run a desktop system, though.)
- problems 9y agoMakes sense, I guess I shouldn't really assume otherwise, that's how ARM is used these days. I hope we'll see some competition on the actual microcontrollers and stuff to push that price down further.
- Koshkin 9y agoMore memory, and a video controller. (I can imagine a PS/2 port implemented through GPIO, but a video controller can only be done using a separate chip.)
- zokier 9y agoOverall I think it would be neat to see a "hackable" (2D) video controller emerge too. There are quite a lot of "small systems" that could use with an easy way to get decent video out (practically speaking HDMI, or maybe DP).
- dom0 9y agoA special chip isn't really needed for this, an FPGA can do all of the above (with the correct bitstream)
- zokier 9y agoFpga, discrete asic, or on-die on soc, that's just implementation detail. Of course I'd expect the first iterations to be fpga based, that's almost unavoidable these days.
- rjsw 9y agoA display controller that can drive HDMI and a 2D graphics accelerator are different things. They just both work from the same framebuffer in a SoC's memory.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoSoftware-generated video is definitely difficult to get working from scratch, limited in resolution, and expensive in CPU cycles, but it's been done on several microcontroller families [1] [2] [3]. You generally still need an external resistor network to do the D/A conversion, though. [1] http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/03/avr-vga-generation.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/03/avr-vga-generation... [3] https://hackaday.io/project/8537-vga-blinking-lights https://hackaday.io/project/8537-vga-blinking-lights
- pjmlp 9y agoThere was the OberonStation, http://oberonstation.x10.mx/ http://oberonstation.x10.mx/ Then there was the Sceptre board, but it went out quite fast. https://www.elektormagazine.com/labs/easy-sceptre-programming-with-oberon-07 https://www.elektormagazine.com/labs/easy-sceptre-programmin... But given Astrobe, there are a few more boards to target.
- rjsw 9y agoOberon will also run on this [1]. [1] http://saanlima.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=64 http://saanlima.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&pr...
- pjmlp 9y agoThanks. Posting the direct link for the Oberon image. http://www.saanlima.com/pepino/index.php?title=Pepino_Oberon http://www.saanlima.com/pepino/index.php?title=Pepino_Oberon
- microcolonel 9y ago> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86 CPUs? Their goal is to be the standard ISA for all general purpose computers; microcontrollers, embedded controllers, servers, HPC, workstations, laptops, smartphones. Microcontrollers happen to be one of the quickest markets to enter with a new ISA. > devices like the ESP32 going for $8 with wifi and bluetooth Well, give Espressif some time, they've been a member of the RISC-V foundation for a while; so I suspect they'll be dropping Tensilica for RISC-V at some point. Maybe we'll see a module like this with RISC-V cores in the nearish future. For now it surely isn't competing in the same part of the market. For what it's worth, the FE310 seems to basically lead in power and peak performance in its category; there are surely some use cases which it is already enabling.
- leggomylibro 9y agoWow, an Espressif device with a RISC-V core would be amazing, even if the power consumption/efficiency weren't quite top-notch. I'm not willing to put in the effort to get a deep knowledge of a brand like Tensilica when there are options like ST's or TI's ARM Cortex-M chips that blow it away in terms of peripherals, power, compatibility, tooling, etc. But an open standard has all kinds of ancillary benefits.
- pgeorgi 9y ago> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals Maybe a bit cynic, but given their churn in the lower level specifications (supervisor mode and up) my guess is: Main goal: write lots of theses and papers and obtain degrees. Secondary goal: have an unencumbered ISA to help with the main goal. Everything else depends on those who adopt the ISA. If some org is willing to spend the multi-million $$$ necessary to design a high-performance desktop class CPU (and more to make it a reality), it will happen. Those low-end chips are easier to do, and an easier market to serve: The ISA's license fees are a bigger chunk of the chip's price, so RISC-V dropping that to 0 helps more. You also don't need to build a high-end chip that blasts everything else out of the water before your newcomer is even considered, since in the microcontroller market there are several pockets of "good enough". If that works out, there might be attempts to scale up later (when they have experience and financial resources to work with).
- microcolonel 9y ago> Everything else depends on those who adopt the ISA. If some org is willing to spend the multi-million $$$ necessary to design a high-performance desktop class CPU (and more to make it a reality), it will happen. It's a good sign that NVIDIA and Qualcomm are both integrating RISC-V for embedded controllers on their chipsets. This means that there will be experience and maybe R&D going into RISC-V cores at these two massive vendors of embedded and mobile CPUs. It is not inconceivable that RISC-V could... cross-contaminate to their high-performance application processor business.
- pjmlp 9y agoYeah, but will they give it back in some form? The examples of contributions from big players using BSD like licenses, specially in the embedded space, proves otherwise.
- imtringued 9y agoWhy does that matter? The only thing they need to do is correctly implement the RISC-V ISA instead of a proprietary ISA.
- zokier 9y agoI think one of the short-term goals is to succeed as an IP core rather than standalone chip. For example I recall that recent nVidia GPUs already have RISC-V cores integrated in management role.
- microcolonel 9y agoApparently Qualcomm is also using RISC-V in roughly the same role. These embedded controllers are the perfect place to start with it, to be sure.
- fish_fan 9y agoI believe one major goal is avoiding active patents.