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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

#41

Post by jplrssn »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #22

This is a harbinger of RISC-V's rise. ARM can't compete in power usage with RV's simple and clean ISA, just like x86 can't compete with ARM's power optimised design. Ultimately power usage decides everything. Eventually there will advanced RV implementations that outdo everything x64 and ARM can offer because of the RV design advantage and because there will be multiple players completing to capture market share. Int…

Can you point to something specific in the Arm ISA for embedded CPUs that makes it less power-efficient than the RISC-V equivalent?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#42

Post by wallaBBB »

fullstop wrote: post #35
wallaBBB wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are actually 2 Nordic SDKs, nRF5 (now in maintenance, but still in many supported products in the field) and nRF Connect (bundled with Zephyr). Later gives a lot of access to both Host and Controller part of the stack and for commercial products that are not simply flipping a lightbulb it is still a standard. ESPs are good for quick hacks and more competitive with Nordic if low power is not an imperative.

I've only used the nRF5 SDK. It worked, and it worked well, but it was cumbersome to work with if you didn't want to keep your code in the same tree as the the SDK itself. This was probably an organizational issue on my part, honestly. The other thing which really bit me was someone here used a symbol name which collided with one used in the SDK, but the build system allowed this to link without error.

nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI.

nRF Connect is a different world, comes with a lot more options, some really rooted in Zephyr OS, some lessons learned from the prior SDK. And if you're familiar with Linux build configuration system, that is basically what Zephyr brings to the table (comes from Linux foundation). But yeah all that flexibility comes as a penalty when you want simple stuff, compared to ESP32-Sx

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#43

Post by fullstop »

wallaBBB wrote: post #42
fullstop wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only used the nRF5 SDK. It worked, and it worked well, but it was cumbersome to work with if you didn't want to keep your code in the same tree as the the SDK itself. This was probably an organizational issue on my part, honestly. The other thing which really bit me was someone here used a symbol name which collided with one used in the SDK, but the build system allowed this to link without error.

nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI. nRF Connect is a different world, comes with a lot…

> nRF5 is indeed inferior SDK of the 2 (thus abandoned). Also I dislike that a big chunk of the stack there is a binary blob. Regarding the code organization, not sure what toolchain you used, but the latest recommendation for nRF5 (Segger studio) could make it fairly easy to do this, but manually opening the project config files and changing them, not through the GUI.

Yes, I ended up editing the .emProject files by hand. It worked, but it felt like I was doing something wrong. I assume that you are referring to the soft device blob? Has that been abandoned in nRF Connect?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#44

Post by [deleted] »

stefan_ wrote: post #14
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.

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 f…

[deleted]

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#45

Post by nxa »

graphe wrote: post #27
audunw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a BBC micro:bit with Nordic SoC for $15 Not exactly $5, but not very expensive either There's also a decent growing community around them You've also got the nRF52 USB dongle which seems similar to those cheaper ESP32 kits, for around $10. > and going past that requires a JTAG programmer No, the official Nordic devkits comes with a built-in debugger. Same for micro:bit. It's just plain USB. That said, I d…

Where are the nRF52 usb dongles for $10?

Have you looked at Mouser or Digikey? $9.60 for per unit, in single unit quantities, heaps in stock as of today.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#46

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

jLaForest wrote: post #38
graphe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every IoT device already uses esp chips, that's the only reason they can afford to make them. Them being low security doesn't matter, it's not like smart homes are secure now. Security is not important to IoT devices.

Esp32 is not low security: https://blog.espressif.com/esp32-s2-security-improvements-5e...

The chances that the popular wireless chip subsidized heavily by the CCP does not have a backdoor somewhere are too low to consider seriously.

They are popular only because they are so cheap. Also, so far as chip shortage, China kept pumping them out.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#47

Post by paulgerhardt »

audunw wrote: post #19
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 serio…

Having bought a few hundred thousand Nordic chips I can assure you they don’t care about security in a meaningful sense.

All Nordic chips are susceptible to bootloader attacks which make them a poor choice for storing key material. This can be mitigated in the design phase by adding an external security chip like a ATECC608B but if you were to tear down a device and see a board present without this module it certainly will have other vulnerabilities too.

Having worked extensively with both Nordic and Chinese chips, what makes Nordic win is the ease of development - they are by far the best in market when it comes to programmability. Hands down.

The security problems have been known since the NRF51 and despite that those vulnerabilities were carried over into the NRF52 because the cost of validation of chip designs is so prohibitive they did not want to touch it and filed the “oh some random person can extract the entire contents of the chip” bug as “won’t fix”. They are baked into a silicon ip core and can’t be fixed with a software update.

As for RISC-V, there are some amazingly innovative and brilliant alternatives to TrustZone presented at the conference but I suspect Rambus may block innovation here using their position on the board (and chairing the security standing committee) in favor of their own (patented) solutions using an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#48

Post by ben-schaaf »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #22

This is a harbinger of RISC-V's rise. ARM can't compete in power usage with RV's simple and clean ISA, just like x86 can't compete with ARM's power optimised design. Ultimately power usage decides everything. Eventually there will advanced RV implementations that outdo everything x64 and ARM can offer because of the RV design advantage and because there will be multiple players completing to capture market share. Int…

I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. The first generation of AMD mobile chips on a comparable process node to Apple only just released and the 7840u is even with the M2 Max in multi-core performance while using less power.

I think the conclusion to draw here is that Apple's efficiency advantage seems to be rooted outside the ISA. Their idle power usage from what I've seen is very impressive.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#49

Post by kees99 »

graphe wrote: post #31
audunw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 serio…

Every IoT device already uses esp chips, that's the only reason they can afford to make them. Them being low security doesn't matter, it's not like smart homes are secure now. Security is not important to IoT devices.

Not every...

Ikea, for example, ships tons of "smart lightbulbs" with silabs/EFR32.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#50

Post by graphe »

nxa wrote: post #45
graphe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the nRF52 usb dongles for $10?

Have you looked at Mouser or Digikey? $9.60 for per unit, in single unit quantities, heaps in stock as of today.

No, I usually get chips on AliExpress or eBay since I usually use esp32 for free shipping and they're $20 or more on there.
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