11 ms·

Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

314 points by hasheddan 3y ago

SigmundurM 3y ago
It was not obvious to me this was talking about a company called Nordic Semiconductor, and not "The Nordic" as in the Nordic countries.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Between Norse, Scandinavian, and Norwegian (all airlines) I guess I've gotten sufficiently used to assuming it'll be a company...
- owlninja 3y ago
  The URL helps
- ruune 3y ago
  I understood Nordic as a company immediately, however I did not know this Nordic. The first Nordic that came to mind was now called THQ Nordic, which I figured couldn't be what was meant. So after a lot of confusion I now know this semiconductor Nordic
  - nativeit 3y ago
    This is all about the NordicTrac home exercise system sold on late night television, right?
- RaoulP 3y ago
  It's common for people at the company (and in the rest of Trondheim) to refer to the company as just "Nordic", which I suppose gets reflected in our blogs (I work there). But personally I agree, better to spell it out. We can't all lay claim to the term "nordic".
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Presumably that headline would be "Nordics are Getting Involved in RISC-V"
ctz 3y ago
Smells like leverage for the next time they renew their ARM license.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  While you might be right, I suspect there will be some years of people doing chips in both ARM and RISC-V to trial balloon it and see how it goes. Most customers will already have ARM toolchain they'd just prefer to stick with. But if it works out for them, I think it will be far more than a marketing play. Having control over the ISA and dropping the license fee while still getting access to industry standard toolchains, is too tempting. ARM would not have gotten a $50B+ valuation if the license fee was seen as not a big deal.
  - 5ADBEEF 3y ago
    Nordic announced a processor w/ Arm + RISC-V cores on the same die. It's already happening!
    - sitkack 3y ago
      Right before Arm becomes MIPS, they will sue customers to not put RV cores on the same die as their Arm cores.
      - snvzz 3y ago
        They won't, as it would result on replacement of said Arm cores. ARM is dumb, but not to this extent.
xadhominemx 3y ago
Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  > getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Not in my experience. Reputable chipmakers are as important as they ever have been. "Westernized" supply chains are a selling point to investors. Regardless, Nordic leads the space because their firmware libraries are best-in-class, and their documentation and support are least-terrible-in-class. The hardware has never been the most sophisticated (or the cheapest) in the segment. ex: until the nRF5340 came out, SiLabs blew them out of the water architecturally, but SiLabs' development tools are a tire fire so it doesn't matter.
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  > is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.
  - xadhominemx 3y ago
    I am not an engineer and have not dealt with the chinese suppliers directly, but my understanding is that their software, support, and documentation have gotten much better. And they are very very cheap because they use RISC-V and/or inexpensive Chinese alternatives to TSMC.
  - 0xDEF 3y ago
    Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.
ryukoposting 3y ago
For those who aren't in the know: Nordic is arguably the leader in small embedded Bluetooth SoCs today. I've written a lot of code for these things. Nordic selling a RISC-V product would open the door to RISC-V in tons of low-cost embedded devices.
- RaoulP 3y ago
  Just to be clear, this blog post follows the recent announcement that Nordic Semiconductor would join a RISC-V consortium. In terms of actual products, the first chips with RISC-V cores were announced back in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35540418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35540418
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
This is a harbinger of RISC-V's rise. ARM can't compete in power usage with RV's simple and clean ISA, just like x86 can't compete with ARM's power optimised design. Ultimately power usage decides everything. Eventually there will advanced RV implementations that outdo everything x64 and ARM can offer because of the RV design advantage and because there will be multiple players completing to capture market share. Intel no longer has a process advantage, and is unlikely to ever regain it.
- flumpcakes 3y ago
  Does a "clean" vs. "messy" ISA really affect power utilisation more than low single digits? I can't see what the difference is outside the FE decoding. Perhaps an ISA having more useful instructions would matter, as we would then be able to implement hardware optimisations. But just having poor ISA encoding or inconsistency seems, to my uneducated eyes, more of a human problem than a machine problem?
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. People claim that there is no efficiency difference in ISAs, but why did Intel not implement a low power processor to compete with ARM, even when it had a process advantage? Maybe they could have pulled it off in terms of power budget but the implementation was too hard.
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      >I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. Complexity also benefits - instead of having to do 12 different simple instruction, you can just do the one obscure instruction appropriate to the situation. The question is whether the actual perf benefits outweigh the costs, and the only correct answer to this is to actually measure what runs faster. Currently we don't have a decades-mature RISC-V chip, but ARM currently outperforms RISC-V massively so it's best to reserve judgement, and not make any hasty claims. Especially since people were claiming RISC would beat out CISC since at least the 90s, and yet three decades later CISC still dominates.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Classic HN: the comments here are more interesting than the article. Off topic, but I have started to realize that I am developing a strong bias of liking anything “open” (open source, open LLMs, books released under Creative Commons licenses, etc., etc.) and a dislike or mistrust against closed proprietary systems. I used to be more balanced in my views. I am not a hardware person, just a humble programmer, but articles about RISC-V always interest me.
qwertox 3y ago
If this wouldn't be the year of mainstream AI, RISC-V's adoption would probably be the most notable fact of the year. It's still so small that it's barely noticeable if you don't follow the news, but if you do, you notice that there's something cooking which will have big implications in a couple of years. Companies could do the same mistake Google did in regard to AI.
antoniuschan99 3y ago
Nordic recently released news that their bluetooth power consumption is even lower (AirTags uses it). They also released a WiFi chip, but it's more like a co-processor so it's not really a competitor to ESP chips because you will still need a microcontroller. Espressif bluetooth isn't comparable because they still haven't gotten the battery consumption down to uA levels yet :$. On the flip side, Esp is releasing the P4 which is just a microcontroller (no wifi or bluetooth so you'll need an ESP32 for co-processing) as there's things you can't currently do on esp32's such as mipi csi to interface with a wider range of camera modules easily. Lastly, I recently discovered a lot of Chinese IoT stuff you get on Amazon (eg. Tuya and Tasmota) have migrated away from Espressif and use Beken (Google OpenBeken). I think it's more comparable to esp8266's but haven't found much info on it. Risc-v is looking likely to be dominant in the iot segment.
bfrog 3y ago
Espressif always seems to be ahead of the game. The premade compliant modules, shifting to riscv, providing a rust sdk, and so on. I like Nordic products in some ways but they are becoming very complex and not necessarily in all the right ways. Esp32 having ble and Wi-Fi in a single part is especially appealing, add in I can now program in rust and avoid all the cruft of C and it’s becoming an ever harder sell.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  In fairness they were previously using Xtensa which is a far worse option than Arm so they had a much bigger incentive to switch to something that people actually wanted.
  - bfrog 3y ago
    for sure, but yeah an fcc licensed ble/wifi/riscv module for $2.50 on digikey? yeah that's a win
    - snvzz 3y ago
      Investigate XH-C2X.
Andrew018 3y ago
[dead]
vkdelta 3y ago
How good is their security? Did they improve over time? https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/sweyntooth/ https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/sweyntooth/

314 points by hasheddan 3y ago

It was not obvious to me this was talking about a company called Nordic Semiconductor, and not "The Nordic" as in the Nordic countries.

vidarh 3y ago
Between Norse, Scandinavian, and Norwegian (all airlines) I guess I've gotten sufficiently used to assuming it'll be a company...
owlninja 3y ago
The URL helps
ruune 3y ago
I understood Nordic as a company immediately, however I did not know this Nordic. The first Nordic that came to mind was now called THQ Nordic, which I figured couldn't be what was meant. So after a lot of confusion I now know this semiconductor Nordic
- nativeit 3y ago
  This is all about the NordicTrac home exercise system sold on late night television, right?
RaoulP 3y ago
It's common for people at the company (and in the rest of Trondheim) to refer to the company as just "Nordic", which I suppose gets reflected in our blogs (I work there). But personally I agree, better to spell it out. We can't all lay claim to the term "nordic".
formerly_proven 3y ago
Presumably that headline would be "Nordics are Getting Involved in RISC-V"

ctz 3y ago

Smells like leverage for the next time they renew their ARM license.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
While you might be right, I suspect there will be some years of people doing chips in both ARM and RISC-V to trial balloon it and see how it goes. Most customers will already have ARM toolchain they'd just prefer to stick with. But if it works out for them, I think it will be far more than a marketing play. Having control over the ISA and dropping the license fee while still getting access to industry standard toolchains, is too tempting. ARM would not have gotten a $50B+ valuation if the license fee was seen as not a big deal.
- 5ADBEEF 3y ago
  Nordic announced a processor w/ Arm + RISC-V cores on the same die. It's already happening!
  - sitkack 3y ago
    Right before Arm becomes MIPS, they will sue customers to not put RV cores on the same die as their Arm cores.
    - snvzz 3y ago
      They won't, as it would result on replacement of said Arm cores. ARM is dumb, but not to this extent.

xadhominemx 3y ago

Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.

ryukoposting 3y ago
> getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Not in my experience. Reputable chipmakers are as important as they ever have been. "Westernized" supply chains are a selling point to investors. Regardless, Nordic leads the space because their firmware libraries are best-in-class, and their documentation and support are least-terrible-in-class. The hardware has never been the most sophisticated (or the cheapest) in the segment. ex: until the nRF5340 came out, SiLabs blew them out of the water architecturally, but SiLabs' development tools are a tire fire so it doesn't matter.
ahartmetz 3y ago
> is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.
- xadhominemx 3y ago
  I am not an engineer and have not dealt with the chinese suppliers directly, but my understanding is that their software, support, and documentation have gotten much better. And they are very very cheap because they use RISC-V and/or inexpensive Chinese alternatives to TSMC.
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.

ryukoposting 3y ago

For those who aren't in the know: Nordic is arguably the leader in small embedded Bluetooth SoCs today. I've written a lot of code for these things. Nordic selling a RISC-V product would open the door to RISC-V in tons of low-cost embedded devices.

RaoulP 3y ago
Just to be clear, this blog post follows the recent announcement that Nordic Semiconductor would join a RISC-V consortium. In terms of actual products, the first chips with RISC-V cores were announced back in April: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35540418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35540418

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

This is a harbinger of RISC-V's rise. ARM can't compete in power usage with RV's simple and clean ISA, just like x86 can't compete with ARM's power optimised design. Ultimately power usage decides everything. Eventually there will advanced RV implementations that outdo everything x64 and ARM can offer because of the RV design advantage and because there will be multiple players completing to capture market share. Intel no longer has a process advantage, and is unlikely to ever regain it.

flumpcakes 3y ago
Does a "clean" vs. "messy" ISA really affect power utilisation more than low single digits? I can't see what the difference is outside the FE decoding. Perhaps an ISA having more useful instructions would matter, as we would then be able to implement hardware optimisations. But just having poor ISA encoding or inconsistency seems, to my uneducated eyes, more of a human problem than a machine problem?
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. People claim that there is no efficiency difference in ISAs, but why did Intel not implement a low power processor to compete with ARM, even when it had a process advantage? Maybe they could have pulled it off in terms of power budget but the implementation was too hard.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    >I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. Complexity also benefits - instead of having to do 12 different simple instruction, you can just do the one obscure instruction appropriate to the situation. The question is whether the actual perf benefits outweigh the costs, and the only correct answer to this is to actually measure what runs faster. Currently we don't have a decades-mature RISC-V chip, but ARM currently outperforms RISC-V massively so it's best to reserve judgement, and not make any hasty claims. Especially since people were claiming RISC would beat out CISC since at least the 90s, and yet three decades later CISC still dominates.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Classic HN: the comments here are more interesting than the article. Off topic, but I have started to realize that I am developing a strong bias of liking anything “open” (open source, open LLMs, books released under Creative Commons licenses, etc., etc.) and a dislike or mistrust against closed proprietary systems. I used to be more balanced in my views. I am not a hardware person, just a humble programmer, but articles about RISC-V always interest me.

qwertox 3y ago

If this wouldn't be the year of mainstream AI, RISC-V's adoption would probably be the most notable fact of the year. It's still so small that it's barely noticeable if you don't follow the news, but if you do, you notice that there's something cooking which will have big implications in a couple of years. Companies could do the same mistake Google did in regard to AI.

antoniuschan99 3y ago

Nordic recently released news that their bluetooth power consumption is even lower (AirTags uses it). They also released a WiFi chip, but it's more like a co-processor so it's not really a competitor to ESP chips because you will still need a microcontroller. Espressif bluetooth isn't comparable because they still haven't gotten the battery consumption down to uA levels yet :$. On the flip side, Esp is releasing the P4 which is just a microcontroller (no wifi or bluetooth so you'll need an ESP32 for co-processing) as there's things you can't currently do on esp32's such as mipi csi to interface with a wider range of camera modules easily. Lastly, I recently discovered a lot of Chinese IoT stuff you get on Amazon (eg. Tuya and Tasmota) have migrated away from Espressif and use Beken (Google OpenBeken). I think it's more comparable to esp8266's but haven't found much info on it. Risc-v is looking likely to be dominant in the iot segment.

bfrog 3y ago

Espressif always seems to be ahead of the game. The premade compliant modules, shifting to riscv, providing a rust sdk, and so on. I like Nordic products in some ways but they are becoming very complex and not necessarily in all the right ways. Esp32 having ble and Wi-Fi in a single part is especially appealing, add in I can now program in rust and avoid all the cruft of C and it’s becoming an ever harder sell.

IshKebab 3y ago
In fairness they were previously using Xtensa which is a far worse option than Arm so they had a much bigger incentive to switch to something that people actually wanted.
- bfrog 3y ago
  for sure, but yeah an fcc licensed ble/wifi/riscv module for $2.50 on digikey? yeah that's a win
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Investigate XH-C2X.

Andrew018 3y ago

[dead]

vkdelta 3y ago

How good is their security? Did they improve over time? https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/sweyntooth/ https://asset-group.github.io/disclosures/sweyntooth/