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I mean, 8051 isn't dead yet. SiLabs continues to make extremely competitive UniversalBee 8051 designs. In my experience, bet on legacy. There will always be en

I mean, 8051 isn't dead yet. SiLabs continues to make extremely competitive UniversalBee 8051 designs. In my experience, bet on legacy. There will always be enough time to wait and switch later if things turn out better. This is doubly so in embedded, where legacy issues / manufacturing issues reign king over performance. ------- Cores are often the wrong thing to focus on anyway at the embedded level. I don't think performance is a major concern. Maybe power/performance is a concern in battery constrained apps, but many electronics will bottleneck elsewhere. So I'm really not sure how or why RISC-V would break into the uC world / low end. If anywhere, they have a chance at the higher level, like at Rasp Pi level chips or stronger.

panick21_ 4y ago
Of course these things never die, MIPS wont die. ARM wont die. Nobody is claiming they will. But also, you don't start very many a huge amount of new project with 8052s. Performance isn't that important maybe (depends on the application), but energy often is, size is, having lots of vendors is, having a large software base is. > So I'm really not sure how or why RISC-V would break into the uC world / low end. If by lower end you mean 8-bit, then no it wont. But one of the large adopters of RISC-V are actually places where there used to be tiny 8-bit cores and now people want more substantial 32-bit cores and RISC-V is really good there. And it has already broken into that market as there are already lots of RISC-V products shipping, lots of them in lots of consumer electronics from China. RISC-V will continue to grow in that market, if you were a MIPS costumer for example, you are likely gone move on to RISC-V? > If anywhere, they have a chance at the higher level, like at Rasp Pi level chips or stronger. At the very low end being very cheap, not involving as many lawyers actually matters quite a bit because volumes are high. Specially when there are very competitive verified opensource cores as well. Ibex: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex Used by Google in the OpenTitan Project Open Hardware Group: https://www.openhwgroup.org/ https://www.openhwgroup.org/ Chips Alliance: https://www.chipsalliance.org https://www.chipsalliance.org Not to mention all the commercial offerings (or commercial offerings that support those open-cores). They might not be open, but its easy to get up and running with RISC-V compared to commercial stuff. There is just so much education moving to RISC-V. Lots of people will be educated in RISC-V and lots of people will look at some of these OpenSource cores to learn. When places like Berkley, Stanford and ETH embrace something it usually trickles down to most universities.

panick21_ 4y ago

Of course these things never die, MIPS wont die. ARM wont die. Nobody is claiming they will. But also, you don't start very many a huge amount of new project with 8052s. Performance isn't that important maybe (depends on the application), but energy often is, size is, having lots of vendors is, having a large software base is. > So I'm really not sure how or why RISC-V would break into the uC world / low end. If by lower end you mean 8-bit, then no it wont. But one of the large adopters of RISC-V are actually places where there used to be tiny 8-bit cores and now people want more substantial 32-bit cores and RISC-V is really good there. And it has already broken into that market as there are already lots of RISC-V products shipping, lots of them in lots of consumer electronics from China. RISC-V will continue to grow in that market, if you were a MIPS costumer for example, you are likely gone move on to RISC-V? > If anywhere, they have a chance at the higher level, like at Rasp Pi level chips or stronger. At the very low end being very cheap, not involving as many lawyers actually matters quite a bit because volumes are high. Specially when there are very competitive verified opensource cores as well. Ibex: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex Used by Google in the OpenTitan Project Open Hardware Group: https://www.openhwgroup.org/ https://www.openhwgroup.org/ Chips Alliance: https://www.chipsalliance.org https://www.chipsalliance.org Not to mention all the commercial offerings (or commercial offerings that support those open-cores). They might not be open, but its easy to get up and running with RISC-V compared to commercial stuff. There is just so much education moving to RISC-V. Lots of people will be educated in RISC-V and lots of people will look at some of these OpenSource cores to learn. When places like Berkley, Stanford and ETH embrace something it usually trickles down to most universities.