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On the other hand, nothing beats free. I am pretty sure every company that makes microcontrollers and embedded processors are at least evaluating RISC-V. I thi

On the other hand, nothing beats free. I am pretty sure every company that makes microcontrollers and embedded processors are at least evaluating RISC-V. I think NXP even announced they will make a chip. Check out this list of members of the RISC-V org: https://riscv.org/members/ https://riscv.org/members/

tcbawo 5y ago
Doesn't free guarantee a lack of fat profit margin, unless you can add some sort of proprietary value on top of a reference design? It's hard to imagine who would make a big investment other than to undercut on price. You'd need a vertical technology stack or a captive audience.
- makapuf 5y ago
  Being an ARM licensee has not been much of a differentiator either, when every other MCU manufacturer does cortex-m
- thenewwazoo 5y ago
  Yes, but on the other hand, when the core is free, all your costs go into integration (which you’d have to do anyway) and those precise value-adds. That means you spend money on the differentiator alone.
  - avianes 5y ago
    RISC-V is not an open-source royalty-free Core design. It's an open-source royalty-free ISA. Using the RISC-V ISA is free, and that means being able to use all the tools developed for this ISA for free. It is still very attractive in terms of cost and competitiveness, but be careful not to confuse ISA and Core design
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit. Even with Apple Silicon, where the CPU cores definitely look exciting, they spent a lot of time in the presentation on some obscure video codec cores - which enable the insane rendering performance. Microcontrollers are another example: you mostly don't buy them for their computational performance, but for their peripherals. Their USP are the right amount of the right interfaces that you happen to need, a crypto unit, the right number and quality of ADCs or DACs, and so on. I think RISC-V will lead to lots of new chips, with the same old boring CPU core, but exciting new co-cores for special use cases. At least that's what I'm pitching to my boss so he will let me start an evaluation project :)

tcbawo 5y ago

Doesn't free guarantee a lack of fat profit margin, unless you can add some sort of proprietary value on top of a reference design? It's hard to imagine who would make a big investment other than to undercut on price. You'd need a vertical technology stack or a captive audience.

makapuf 5y ago
Being an ARM licensee has not been much of a differentiator either, when every other MCU manufacturer does cortex-m
thenewwazoo 5y ago
Yes, but on the other hand, when the core is free, all your costs go into integration (which you’d have to do anyway) and those precise value-adds. That means you spend money on the differentiator alone.
- avianes 5y ago
  RISC-V is not an open-source royalty-free Core design. It's an open-source royalty-free ISA. Using the RISC-V ISA is free, and that means being able to use all the tools developed for this ISA for free. It is still very attractive in terms of cost and competitiveness, but be careful not to confuse ISA and Core design
turbinerneiter 5y ago
It's all about adding some sort of proprietary value. Think of Google Tensor: some boring ARM standard reference design cores, but an exciting new tensor unit. Even with Apple Silicon, where the CPU cores definitely look exciting, they spent a lot of time in the presentation on some obscure video codec cores - which enable the insane rendering performance. Microcontrollers are another example: you mostly don't buy them for their computational performance, but for their peripherals. Their USP are the right amount of the right interfaces that you happen to need, a crypto unit, the right number and quality of ADCs or DACs, and so on. I think RISC-V will lead to lots of new chips, with the same old boring CPU core, but exciting new co-cores for special use cases. At least that's what I'm pitching to my boss so he will let me start an evaluation project :)