NRF54 Bluetooth line of chips announced with RISC-V coprocessors(nordicsemi.com)
nordicsemi.com
NRF54 Bluetooth line of chips announced with RISC-V coprocessors
https://www.nordicsemi.com//News/2023/04/Nordic-Semiconductor-redefines-its-leadership-in-Bluetooth-Low-Energy-with-the-nRF54-Series
2 comments
>The nRF54H20 boasts multiple Arm® Cortex®-M33 processors and multiple RISC-V coprocessors.
It is a start, but they have not let go of the legacy architecture yet.
They're taking their time to fully adopt the industry standard.
It is a start, but they have not let go of the legacy architecture yet.
They're taking their time to fully adopt the industry standard.
The industry standard is without a shred of a doubt ARM.
ARM is, without a shred of a doubt, the legacy architecture.
It maybe is, and if it is, it's also still the current industry standard. I work on embedded projects, and RISC-V is in a stage of "a minority of customers is considering it", with it being totally irrelevant currently for large swaths of markets. That's "up-and-coming challenger" at best, not "industry standard".
RISC-V is inevitable.
But it has few available chips right now, none of which are ultra-pow-power IoT app cores, and the big stacks like Zephyr & Matter & NuttX & FreeRTOS only support a sprinkling of chips anyways.
I don't disagree with you per se, but it's still such early formative years & progress is slow.
The core is just such a small part too. It's great to see risc-vites starting to spec our the rest of the platform too. But like the first decades of ARM, it feels like most chips especially lightweight ones have bespoke Device-Tree configuration, rather than real platform.
I don't disagree with you per se, but it's still such early formative years & progress is slow.
The core is just such a small part too. It's great to see risc-vites starting to spec our the rest of the platform too. But like the first decades of ARM, it feels like most chips especially lightweight ones have bespoke Device-Tree configuration, rather than real platform.
I recently have picked up some Silicon Labs boards which have been very nice too. I'd love someday to better comparative characterize their power consumption.
Both companies seem to be really shifting into gear on the software front to make the chips far more productizable. SiLabs is getting into Zephyr IoT. They have a huge Thread/Matter sdk they push back upstream from. Nordic has like two engineers who have just been on fire making bleeding edge BT possible on Zephyr which is gripping-my-seat great to get to witness.
It's so excellent to see companies that want to sell chips. It feels like bigger app processors (for ex for tablets) are unobtainable/a pita. The fpga industry resolutely does not give AF at all about toolchains/usability, profiteers off selling add on IP blocks galore (for Gods sake pick a side, are you a hardware or software company.)