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A comment on BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux. Parent comment

Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by pjc50 on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:01AM (#25763720)
> quit paying ARM a percentage

The percentage is very small, though. So this argument only works for very high volume use cases, which is why the RISC-V eval boards are currently far more expensive than comparable ARMs.

Do WD do their own silicon yet, or do they just buy the parts?

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by nickik on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:05PM (#25764866)
WD has their own cores and they are OpenSource. Very nice designs. They also spend a lot of money on the open source ecosystem for chip development.

See:

- https://www.westerndigital.com/company/innovations/risc-v

- https://chipsalliance.org/

- https://github.com/chipsalliance/Cores-SweRV

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by reportingsjr on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:26AM (#25764183)
How many ARM microcontrollers are low volume? Pretty much all of the examples I can think of are incredibly high volume. STM32, SAMD21/51, i.MX, etc.

WD said they were finishing taping out their first production design about a year and a half ago, so I assume they have started shipping them at this point, but it's hard to find info.

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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by blihp on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @12:59PM (#25765657)
Hasn't WD been doing their own silicon (at least from a design standpoint, they still use someone else's fab) precisely because the 'small percentage' ARM charges matters for their margins? In a world where we have ESP-01 boards which retail for $2, even a couple of percent matters.
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Re:BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run L... by Narishma on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:05AM (#25763822)
They design them. I don't know if they make them or not.
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