[chbot] RISC-V micro-controller.

[Charles Manning]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 2:51 PM, hamster <hamster at snap.net.nz> wrote:

> I got a SiFive HiFive1 RISC-V devboard for Christmas - the hint to my wife
> worked. The board I got was an "early access" model of
> https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/
>

Soft cores are interesting & fun to play with.


> If you want to a little about the RISC-V architecture have a look at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V - but the summary from Wikipedia is
> "The RISC-V authors aim to provide several CPU designs freely available
> under a BSD license". It is likely be the next big thing for semi-custom
> silicon designs - much like ARM cores but without any of the licensing
> issues.
>
Sorry I doubt that it's going to get traction just because it is freely
available.

There are numerous other cores out there already that anyone can use (eg.
SPARC-LEON, OpenRISC,...)  so adding Yet Another Core to the pot is hardly
a game changer.

The "killer benefits" of ARM are at least:
1) It has huge traction from tiny M0s up to honking great multi-cores.
People have been royally sick of having to learn new architectures all the
time. That makes it a "no-brainer" for the customer.
2) ARM does an exceptional job of marketing and providing technical
services to the chip vendors.
3) ARM puts huge amounts of investment into providing good free toolchains.


I can't see anyone eating their lunch for quite some while (not until they
get arrogant like Intel anyway).
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