3 ms·
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.
by 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 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!