4 ms·

While the consumer market is still years away from widespread RISC-V adoption, if you pay attention to the embedded / MCU market (especially Espressif & co) you

While the consumer market is still years away from widespread RISC-V adoption, if you pay attention to the embedded / MCU market (especially Espressif & co) you will indeed come to the conclusion that RISC-V is inevitable and software maturity will probably come from these early adopters. Go!

rwmj 3mo ago
Krste wasn't even saying anything controversial. It's obvious that manufacturers will use the cheapest (free) least legally entangled option, and that this adoption will happen first amongst those with the tightest margins. And - Clayton's law[1] - it will eventually extend to the rest of the market (albeit over a very long time). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
- incrudible 3mo ago
  The good RISC-V designs are not free though and the free ones are not good. MCUs are not a category of computer to draw lessons from for the broader market.
  - rwmj 3mo ago
    is what every company that didn't understand disruption said.
    - hughw 3mo ago
      iirc Christenson's chief example was IBM not deigning to cannibalize their high-end disk drive business by competing on the new, less capable low-end devices.
  - cold_pizz4 3mo ago
    Wait a few years until a RISC-V Fab as a Service emerges and any teenager with an LLM can design and order their own chips ;)
    - Geezus_42 3mo ago
      Pipedream
  - crote 3mo ago
    The good ARM designs aren't free either. The big difference is that you'll always be stuck paying Arm (either for whole ARM cores, or a licensing fee for your own design), whereas with RISC-V there can be genuine competition between companies offering performant RISC-V IP. In the MCU market the compute core is already an off-the-shelf drop-in component. Just look at the RP2350: in addition to its traditional ARM cores they also last-minute dropped in two RISC-V cores because it was so trivial to do - and you can select which set is active via a boot-time firmware flag. I very much doubt we'll see that kind of flexibility with high-end client compute, but with the switch to separate compute chiplets we're not far off already!
oblio 3mo ago
I wouldn't bet against software inertia. x86 only missed the mobile market because of multiple bad business decisions, otherwise ARM (and RISC architectures overall) would have been relegated to more decades as backwater architectures. There is nothing inevitable about anything as Apple controls its own silicon very tightly, Microsoft hasn't even really transitioned away from x86, and Android probably isn't very keen to transition away from ARM. Now, embedded markets are different but they've always been different and the number of embedded programmers is dwarfed by non embedded programmers and regular users will for a long time never install an app on RISC-V. It's an interesting journey, let's see where it takes us in 20 years.
- 0x000xca0xfe 3mo ago
  Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China. Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.
    - crote 3mo ago
      > Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices. Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.
      - 3mo ago

rwmj 3mo ago

Krste wasn't even saying anything controversial. It's obvious that manufacturers will use the cheapest (free) least legally entangled option, and that this adoption will happen first amongst those with the tightest margins. And - Clayton's law[1] - it will eventually extend to the rest of the market (albeit over a very long time). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

incrudible 3mo ago
The good RISC-V designs are not free though and the free ones are not good. MCUs are not a category of computer to draw lessons from for the broader market.
- rwmj 3mo ago
  is what every company that didn't understand disruption said.
  - hughw 3mo ago
    iirc Christenson's chief example was IBM not deigning to cannibalize their high-end disk drive business by competing on the new, less capable low-end devices.
- cold_pizz4 3mo ago
  Wait a few years until a RISC-V Fab as a Service emerges and any teenager with an LLM can design and order their own chips ;)
  - Geezus_42 3mo ago
    Pipedream
- crote 3mo ago
  The good ARM designs aren't free either. The big difference is that you'll always be stuck paying Arm (either for whole ARM cores, or a licensing fee for your own design), whereas with RISC-V there can be genuine competition between companies offering performant RISC-V IP. In the MCU market the compute core is already an off-the-shelf drop-in component. Just look at the RP2350: in addition to its traditional ARM cores they also last-minute dropped in two RISC-V cores because it was so trivial to do - and you can select which set is active via a boot-time firmware flag. I very much doubt we'll see that kind of flexibility with high-end client compute, but with the switch to separate compute chiplets we're not far off already!

oblio 3mo ago

I wouldn't bet against software inertia. x86 only missed the mobile market because of multiple bad business decisions, otherwise ARM (and RISC architectures overall) would have been relegated to more decades as backwater architectures. There is nothing inevitable about anything as Apple controls its own silicon very tightly, Microsoft hasn't even really transitioned away from x86, and Android probably isn't very keen to transition away from ARM. Now, embedded markets are different but they've always been different and the number of embedded programmers is dwarfed by non embedded programmers and regular users will for a long time never install an app on RISC-V. It's an interesting journey, let's see where it takes us in 20 years.

0x000xca0xfe 3mo ago
Chinese companies are really into RISC-V and China both builds and uses a lot of smartphones, I'm very sure we won't have to wait 20 years for regular users installing apps on RISC-V hardware.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  It still requires Android to care about RISC-V, plenty of NDK stuff. https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/abis Then OSes like HarmonyOS and HarmonyOS NEXT aren't even that relevant outside China. Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices.
  - crote 3mo ago
    > Finally the chips have to deliver in performance, to actually provide good mobile devices. Or the other way around: the low-end market wants to adopt it due to lower licensing fees, so Android is incentivized to support RISC-V or risk losing that market to a competing platform. Especially in markets with a God App like Wechat something in-between feature phone and smartphone won't be a very hard sell. RISC-V adoption can grow upwards from there.
    - 3mo ago