Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC-V joint venture

Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by FirmwareBurner on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:30AM (#37022992)

PIC and AVR (along with 8051 and 6502 based designs) are still used in current consumer products reusing older designs. Yes, ARM Cortex-M0 can cost the same while offering 2x the processing processing power, but redesigning the PCB and rewriting the entire codebase for a new MCU would offset the processing power gains, which are not needed anyway.

Most white-label consumer goods just need to poll some keypad buttons, react to some interrupts, and turn a relay ON/OFF depending on a simple state machine reading an ADC, where an 8-/16-bit PIC/AVR is more than enough. If they have a built-in DSP even better.

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Re:Qualcomm – one of Arm’s biggest customers – starts a RISC... by brucehoult on Friday August 11, 2023 @03:32AM (#37086092)

A 6502 or 8051 can do the job but their prices haven't dropped a lot.

You can get a 48 MHz RISC-V from WCH (a big 8051 supplier) or Cortex-M0 from Puya for $0.10 to $0.15 depending on whether it's an 8, 16, or 20 pin package. Both the CH32V003 has 2 KB SRAM and 16 KB flash, and the Puya 3 KB SRAM and 20 KB flash. You get the above prices for the WCH at qty 50 (i.e. $5 - $7) on their Aliexpress store, plus a couple of bucks shipping.

Being "too powerful" for the job is irrelevant if it's cheaper anyway. Plus easier to use because both use standard GCC/LLVM, support debugging etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]