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Yeah, it was the BLxxx family I was looking at. I'll look at the CH32V family. As for the CV1800B, I note that it has an 8051 in the RTC domain. Which misses

by bsder 3y ago

Yeah, it was the BLxxx family I was looking at. I'll look at the CH32V family. As for the CV1800B, I note that it has an 8051 in the RTC domain. Which misses the whole bloody point of RISC-V. > It's preliminary, but has some 700 pages already (!). Then they've only got another 4300 pages to go ... :) (By comparison: see the AM3359 Technical Reference Manual from TI which is 5100 pages long).

snvzz 3y ago
>(By comparison: see the AM3359 Technical Reference Manual from TI which is 5100 pages long). It looks that much larger and much more complex design. It's also been around for a while, having released in 2011. Unsurprisingly, a significant amount of pages are used to describe the CPU, interrupt controller, memory management and other such ARM-specific cruft. In contrast, RISC-V is much simpler, cleaner, and much more thoroughly standardized, thus the vendor can simply point to the relevant RISC-V specs. >Then they've only got another 4300 pages to go ... :) At least you are just joking :) The less the documentation needed to describe the same functionality the better. Simplicity is valuable on its own, thus complexity needs be justified.
- bsder 3y ago
  > In contrast, RISC-V is much simpler, cleaner, and much more thoroughly standardized, thus the vendor can simply point to the relevant RISC-V specs. I doubt it. Even simple questions like "How many clock cycles to access SPI register X?" wind up surprisingly complicated. And the manufacturer needs to document all of it because there just aren't enough users to figure it all out by experiment. Even if your CPU is 100% bog standard (and these are not), documenting the peripherals takes a ton of work. Datasheets, in general, tend to be horrible. However, I find that the Chinese datasheets are particularly dreadful whether the chips are simple or complex.

by bsder 3y ago

snvzz 3y ago

>(By comparison: see the AM3359 Technical Reference Manual from TI which is 5100 pages long). It looks that much larger and much more complex design. It's also been around for a while, having released in 2011. Unsurprisingly, a significant amount of pages are used to describe the CPU, interrupt controller, memory management and other such ARM-specific cruft. In contrast, RISC-V is much simpler, cleaner, and much more thoroughly standardized, thus the vendor can simply point to the relevant RISC-V specs. >Then they've only got another 4300 pages to go ... :) At least you are just joking :) The less the documentation needed to describe the same functionality the better. Simplicity is valuable on its own, thus complexity needs be justified.

bsder 3y ago
> In contrast, RISC-V is much simpler, cleaner, and much more thoroughly standardized, thus the vendor can simply point to the relevant RISC-V specs. I doubt it. Even simple questions like "How many clock cycles to access SPI register X?" wind up surprisingly complicated. And the manufacturer needs to document all of it because there just aren't enough users to figure it all out by experiment. Even if your CPU is 100% bog standard (and these are not), documenting the peripherals takes a ton of work. Datasheets, in general, tend to be horrible. However, I find that the Chinese datasheets are particularly dreadful whether the chips are simple or complex.