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Krste wasn't even saying anything controversial. It's obvious that manufacturers will use the cheapest (free) least legally entangled option, and that this ado
by 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 agoThe 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 agois what every company that didn't understand disruption said.
- hughw 3mo agoiirc 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 agoWait 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 agoPipedream
- crote 3mo agoThe 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!