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Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

blog.nordicsemi.com

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Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#11

Post by 0xDEF »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8
xadhominemx wrote: post #5

Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.

> is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.

Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits.

Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#13

Post by fullstop »

xadhominemx wrote: post #5

Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.

Unless things have changed recently, Nordic is still king of low power applications.

With that being said, I've worked with both the Nordic NRF SDK and the Espressif SDK and greatly preferred Espressif.

For doo-dads that I make for my home, esp32 and esp8266 are fantastic. The modules are inexpensive and the community is huge. I would not want to be in Nordic's shoes right now.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#14

Post by stefan_ »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8
xadhominemx wrote: post #5

Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.

> is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.

They don't exactly make their own Bluetooth stack yet, e.g. the one chinese RISCV board I have seen used IP from RivieraWaves (made in France & Israel):

https://www.ceva-dsp.com/product/rivierawaves-bluetooth-plat...

At the end of the day, 2.4 GHz frontends can be done in the same silicon process that makes your SoC and the antenna needs to be nothing more than a PCB trace, so what on earth was going to save Nordic from competition?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#15

Post by fullstop »

0xDEF wrote: post #11
ahartmetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.

Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.

You can get started with esp32 for $5. Nordic devkits are more expensive, and going past that requires a JTAG programmer, which is an expensive option for hobbyists and students.

It's not surprising that they have taken off like they have. Initially it was because it was inexpensive, but now the community is huge and that is a very attractive selling point.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#16

Post by RaoulP »

ryukoposting wrote: post #6

For those who aren't in the know: Nordic is arguably the leader in small embedded Bluetooth SoCs today. I've written a lot of code for these things. Nordic selling a RISC-V product would open the door to RISC-V in tons of low-cost embedded devices.

Just to be clear, this blog post follows the recent announcement that Nordic Semiconductor would join a RISC-V consortium.

In terms of actual products, the first chips with RISC-V cores were announced back in April:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35540418

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#17

Post by boesboes »

0xDEF wrote: post #11
ahartmetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors Oh lordy. Bluetooth is about to get even worse? AFAIK, Nordic's harwdare and software are among the few high quality Bluetooth stacks.

Maybe the quality of the Chinese competitors is/was worse but ESP32 and its predecessor have completely taken over the cheap BLE/WiFi segment by simply flooding hobbyists and students with ultra-cheap devkits. Maybe something the Western competitors should learn from.

Definitely! And make sure to sell to consumers too if you want to compete. Anecdotal, but I wanted to build a 3D printer, most parts are simply not available in the EU if you are normal person. Even stuff like hex-bolts and t-nuts are impossible to source in the EU outside of specialty webshops where the markup is 2000%.

And that was just the mechanical parts...

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#18

Post by vidarh »

SigmundurM wrote: post #2

It was not obvious to me this was talking about a company called Nordic Semiconductor, and not "The Nordic" as in the Nordic countries.

Between Norse, Scandinavian, and Norwegian (all airlines) I guess I've gotten sufficiently used to assuming it'll be a company...

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#19

Post by audunw »

xadhominemx wrote: post #5

Nordic is a very high volume supplier of BT chips for consumer applications, but is getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors. Among the western chip companies, they are the ideal candidate for RISC-V adoption. I'm very curious to see what TI is planning for RISC-V as they begin to seriously engage in the low cost general purpose microcontroller market for the first time.

> "getting crushed by a wave of very low cost Chinese competitors"

That's an odd way of spelling "maintaining a stable market share in the face of Chinese competition".

Going forward, IoT security is going to be an increasingly important factor for new designs. The EU is quite serious about combating security problems with IoT devices. And security is something that the new products coming out of Nordic is very serious about.

I don't think many big, serious device manufacturers are willing to risk being the target of the first catastrophic IoT attack just to save some pennies on a dirt cheap Chinese design, with some poorly verified RISC-V core thrown in with a power hungry Bluetooth radio.

ARM TrustZone is not something the RISC-V ecosystem has a clear standardized answer to yet. So I think that's a reason why ARM will keep its role as the main application processor in high-end BT/Thread chips for the next several years.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#20

Post by cmrdporcupine »

ctz wrote: post #3

Smells like leverage for the next time they renew their ARM license.

While you might be right, I suspect there will be some years of people doing chips in both ARM and RISC-V to trial balloon it and see how it goes. Most customers will already have ARM toolchain they'd just prefer to stick with.

But if it works out for them, I think it will be far more than a marketing play. Having control over the ISA and dropping the license fee while still getting access to industry standard toolchains, is too tempting.

ARM would not have gotten a $50B+ valuation if the license fee was seen as not a big deal.

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