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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

#51

Post by antoniuschan99 »

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.

That's not true anymore. There was a shift to Beken Chips a year or two ago so a lot of your Amazon WiFi iot stuff uses that now (Tuya and Tasmota). Check out OpenBeken. I can't find much info on it but thinking it's cheaper than esp's probably more similar to esp8266 than esp32. Espressif chips are much more secure nowadays compared to the esp8266 days.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#52

Post by Qwertious »

ihattendorf wrote: post #30
boesboes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Do you not have anything like Home Depot/Grainger/McMaster-Carr in the EU? A quick check shows 3/8"-16 T-Nuts are $10/10, $15/50, and $33/100 respectively, with the first two available within a 15 minute drive of my location in the US.

I think the above comment is talking about domestically produced items?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#53

Post by the__alchemist »

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.

They have excellent documentation, and their register-level APIs are relatively high level.

Most of their chips fall into this or a related niche: good-enough computating and IO capabilities with RF for battery-powered devices. If I were to build something like this, they'd be my top choice.

I wish they would move away from the third-party suppliers for making their integrated modules. So you could buy a 'nRF-53 module with antenna' instead of browsing third party websites.

Speaking of competing with China: A Wi-Fi-capable Nordic chip is a glaring omission in their lineup. Give Espressif some competition!

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#54

Post by qwertox »

If this wouldn't be the year of mainstream AI, RISC-V's adoption would probably be the most notable fact of the year. It's still so small that it's barely noticeable if you don't follow the news, but if you do, you notice that there's something cooking which will have big implications in a couple of years.

Companies could do the same mistake Google did in regard to AI.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#55

Post by connicpu »

graphe wrote: post #40
jLaForest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is up to the manufacturer to implement it, most esp devices like 8266 and 32 have weak security firmware, are easily hackable (benefit to me). Most don't have security in mind and don't get security updates.

The new ESP32 models coming out, especially the RISC-V models, all have security features like Flash encryption and hardware cryptography modules. Unfortunate for those who like to reflash consumer devices.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#56

Post by Qwertious »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #36
flumpcakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does a "clean" vs. "messy" ISA really affect power utilisation more than low single digits? I can't see what the difference is outside the FE decoding. Perhaps an ISA having more useful instructions would matter, as we would then be able to implement hardware optimisations. But just having poor ISA encoding or inconsistency seems, to my uneducated eyes, more of a human problem than a machine problem?

I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power. People claim that there is no efficiency difference in ISAs, but why did Intel not implement a low power processor to compete with ARM, even when it had a process advantage? Maybe they could have pulled it off in terms of power budget but the implementation was too hard.

>I think complexity always costs. You have to devote more gates to implementing it, more engineering, more area, and more power.

Complexity also benefits - instead of having to do 12 different simple instruction, you can just do the one obscure instruction appropriate to the situation.

The question is whether the actual perf benefits outweigh the costs, and the only correct answer to this is to actually measure what runs faster.

Currently we don't have a decades-mature RISC-V chip, but ARM currently outperforms RISC-V massively so it's best to reserve judgement, and not make any hasty claims. Especially since people were claiming RISC would beat out CISC since at least the 90s, and yet three decades later CISC still dominates.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#57

Post by antoniuschan99 »

Nordic recently released news that their bluetooth power consumption is even lower (AirTags uses it). They also released a WiFi chip, but it's more like a co-processor so it's not really a competitor to ESP chips because you will still need a microcontroller. Espressif bluetooth isn't comparable because they still haven't gotten the battery consumption down to uA levels yet :$.

On the flip side, Esp is releasing the P4 which is just a microcontroller (no wifi or bluetooth so you'll need an ESP32 for co-processing) as there's things you can't currently do on esp32's such as mipi csi to interface with a wider range of camera modules easily.

Lastly, I recently discovered a lot of Chinese IoT stuff you get on Amazon (eg. Tuya and Tasmota) have migrated away from Espressif and use Beken (Google OpenBeken). I think it's more comparable to esp8266's but haven't found much info on it.

Risc-v is looking likely to be dominant in the iot segment.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#58

Post by lionpixel »

fullstop wrote: post #15
0xDEF wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For $9.90 you get a Seeed Xiao NRF52840[1] board with Arduino support. In sleep mode it consumes just 1µA. In my spare time I'm building smart locks with these that last for up to 2 years with a CR123 battery. Recently I switched from Arduino to the nrf Connect SDK and a tiny nrf52832 board that cost just 4$ on AliExpress. Works like a charm.

[1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/Seeed-XIAO-BLE-nRF52840-p-5201.h...

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#59

Post by 5ADBEEF »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #47
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…

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 certainl…

The famous APProtect bug was patched in a silicon rev IIRC. Unless you're thinking of another exploit

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#60

Post by josephcsible »

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…

Isn't TrustZone inherently evil, though? Isn't its main use to let the megacorps trust that your device won't do what you want and will keep secrets from you?
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