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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

#111

Post by zh3 »

fullstop wrote: post #100
zh3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple hack is a softlink to the actual SDK. On the other hand, checking in the whole SDK as part of a project gives an impressive LoC tally ;) Link issue was possibly macro craziness? The scars of sdk_config.h etc.

If you base your project off of one of the examples, the project file has relative paths back to the SDK. For example: No amount of symlinking can fix this, and there's a lot of these files. Maybe copying an example project is not the right way to do things. The link issue was, I think, the result of what Nordic does with weak symbols. I don't recall the symbol name, but it was something which caused very unusual res…

If you're using segger, a quick find-and-replace will take care of that (ditto GCC Makefiles). Must admit that when I started with nrf52 SDK, I too used thge embed-the-application-inside-the-SDK approach. Pretty soon that got cumbersome, so I switched to the softlink approach. The exact approach is to store the SDK somewhere, create a softlink to it in the project directory and have the project files/makefiles use that instead.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#112

Post by wallaBBB »

fullstop wrote: post #43
wallaBBB wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I assume that you are referring to the soft device blob? Has that been abandoned in nRF Connect?

Quite, yes. They took the ZephyrOS approach, but it comes with a learning curve penalty, unless you go the easy route of nRF Connect GUI. In that case you do have some limitations of how you organize the code base (so that the GUI works), but even that is miles ahead in configuration compared with to the nRF5 SDK + Segger Studio.

Some skim reading material about it: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/...

https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF_Connect_SDK/doc/latest/...

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#113

Post by snvzz »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #48
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.

AIUI Apple is using a better node than AMD, and they lose despite.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#114

Post by snvzz »

sitkack wrote: post #83
5ADBEEF wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nordic announced a processor w/ Arm + RISC-V cores on the same die. It's already happening!

Right before Arm becomes MIPS, they will sue customers to not put RV cores on the same die as their Arm cores.

They won't, as it would result on replacement of said Arm cores.

ARM is dumb, but not to this extent.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#115

Post by snvzz »

bfrog wrote: post #97
IshKebab wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness they were previously using Xtensa which is a far worse option than Arm so they had a much bigger incentive to switch to something that people actually wanted.

for sure, but yeah an fcc licensed ble/wifi/riscv module for $2.50 on digikey? yeah that's a win

Investigate XH-C2X.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#116

Post by imtringued »

flumpcakes wrote: post #25
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…

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?

>ISA really affect power utilisation more than low single digits?

Your overall power consumption is already in milliwatts. Of course it matters. The fans on your desktop consume more power than these chips.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#117

Post by snvzz »

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…

>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.

RISC-V members have to sign an agreement when they join, which has clauses to prevent this sort of situation.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#118

Post by imtringued »

Qwertious wrote: post #56
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Look I'm a fan of x86 processors for the high end, because the gap is just that large. But when you are building these MCUs, you actually want your transistor count to be as small as possible. These chips don't have anything complicated going on. They probably have a simple five stage pipeline with most of the transistors going into the minimum 32 general purpose registers, CSR registers and pipeline registers instead of actual logic.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#119

Post by connicpu »

stagger87 wrote: post #88
baq wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much is the soldering station to do that?

$100 and a steady hand :)

I got a cheap hot air station from amazon for only $40, works quite well! Maybe another $10 for solder wire and $10 for flux and you're good to go

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#120

Post by xadhominemx »

the__alchemist wrote: post #53
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 modu…

They are working on Wi-Fi
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