4 ms·
10c per part is incredibly high depending on how low-cost we're talking. If your chip needs very basic processing, and you're going to sell it for less than a
by themoonisachees 2y ago
10c per part is incredibly high depending on how low-cost we're talking.
If your chip needs very basic processing, and you're going to sell it for less than a cent per chip, you need your core to be basically free.
Sure RISC-V is very inexpensive, but for parts like these risc is massive overkill and as a modern core, you'll be spending a lot of die area on a core that should really be an ASIC, but designing an ASIC is expensive so you can just slap a 6502 in that bad boy and call it a day.
On the other end of the scale, you'd be surprised to learn that many chips you don't ever interface with as a user contain even ARM cores. These are usually ASICs in high-end products.
- jeffgreco 2y agoGo on!
- snvzz 2y ago>but for parts like these risc is massive overkill You seem to underestimate how small a RISC-V core can be. Take a look at SERV.
- irdc 2y agoThere’s also the cost of rewriting (yes, from assembler) all the existing code. And don’t forget QA.
- monocasa 2y agoThe area of just the register file (even for rv32e) is higher area than the survivors of the 8 bit ucontrollers.
- snvzz 2y agoNot true for SERV vs 6502. SERV is smaller.
- userbinator 2y ago16 registers * 32 bits * 4 transistors / cell = 2k transistors just for storing the bits alone, and that's not including the decoding and read/write circuitry.