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This is not what I am seeing at all. The ISA war is really a two front issue: compute, and control. Control implementation vastly outnumbers compute. Heck, for

by K0balt 1y ago

This is not what I am seeing at all. The ISA war is really a two front issue: compute, and control. Control implementation vastly outnumbers compute. Heck, for any given compute motherboard with 4 or 32 cores, there is 10-50 control processors, each with 1-4 cores. A car has hundreds. Many lightbulbs have one or two cores. Basically everything electronic has an MCU these days, because a microcontroller is actually cheaper than a nand chip. Even advanced transistors as used in automotive switching often have a microcontroller, albeit a very rudimentary one. In this world, riscV is eating ARM and everything else alive slowly but surely. RiscV will take longer to mature into a good application processor, but it inevitably will. It will take over Arm for the same reason Arm is eating away at x86. My prediction is that in 20 years, it will be the predominant architecture for most sequential computing applications.

K0balt 1y ago
Self-reply here since the edit window timed out: I think the driver here is cost. You don’t see 50mhz ARM cores for $0.07 for a reason, and that reason is that the licensing of the ARM ISA does not make that possible. So at the low end, riscV is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost for comparable performance based on licensing costs alone. In a market where discrete components sell for thousandths of a dollar, a few cents is huge and a dollar is catastrophic. The difference between ARM and riscV can easily be a 40 percent reduction in BOM cost, or significantly improved features and performance at the same cost.
- brucehoult 1y ago
  The CH32V003 is a nice RISC-V chip at a great price, and deservedly popular, but there is in fact an Arm chip in the same space, the Cortex-M0+ Puya PY32F002A, which has the same MHz but a little more RAM (3k) and flash (20k). Being Chinese there has been some suggestion that they haven't actually paid for the CM0 core, but it's supported in Keil and I think listed somewhere on the main Arm site too, which tends to rule that out. (WCH has already introduced successors to the CH32V003 with more RAM and flash at the same $0.10 price -- and even the CH570D with 96 MHz, 12k RAM, 240k flash, USB, and a 2.4 GHz packet radio -- but they are not as widely available yet)

by K0balt 1y ago

K0balt 1y ago

Self-reply here since the edit window timed out: I think the driver here is cost. You don’t see 50mhz ARM cores for $0.07 for a reason, and that reason is that the licensing of the ARM ISA does not make that possible. So at the low end, riscV is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost for comparable performance based on licensing costs alone. In a market where discrete components sell for thousandths of a dollar, a few cents is huge and a dollar is catastrophic. The difference between ARM and riscV can easily be a 40 percent reduction in BOM cost, or significantly improved features and performance at the same cost.

brucehoult 1y ago
The CH32V003 is a nice RISC-V chip at a great price, and deservedly popular, but there is in fact an Arm chip in the same space, the Cortex-M0+ Puya PY32F002A, which has the same MHz but a little more RAM (3k) and flash (20k). Being Chinese there has been some suggestion that they haven't actually paid for the CM0 core, but it's supported in Keil and I think listed somewhere on the main Arm site too, which tends to rule that out. (WCH has already introduced successors to the CH32V003 with more RAM and flash at the same $0.10 price -- and even the CH570D with 96 MHz, 12k RAM, 240k flash, USB, and a 2.4 GHz packet radio -- but they are not as widely available yet)