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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

#31

Post by graphe »

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…

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.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#32

Post by wallaBBB »

fullstop wrote: post #13
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.

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.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#33

Post by SwaraLink »

fullstop wrote: post #28
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…

> No, the official Nordic devkits comes with a built-in debugger. Same for micro:bit. It's just plain USB. Right, the devkits can do this. If you want to go past that, like making your own PCB with a NRF52 on it you need JTAG, which is not a requirement for esp32. Maybe the NRF52 has some sort of ROM serial loader that I've missed though.

It’s actually possible to use the debugger on the NRF dev kits to flash/debug custom PCBs with NRF chips. So a separate (more expensive) JTAG debugger is in fact not required.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#34

Post by nativeit »

ruune wrote: post #7
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.

I understood Nordic as a company immediately, however I did not know this Nordic. The first Nordic that came to mind was now called THQ Nordic, which I figured couldn't be what was meant. So after a lot of confusion I now know this semiconductor Nordic

This is all about the NordicTrac home exercise system sold on late night television, right?

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#35

Post by fullstop »

wallaBBB wrote: post #32
fullstop wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#36

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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?

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.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#37

Post by wallaBBB »

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.

GDB options for debugging/flashing can be had for sub 10eur, Segger is not mandatory. Moreover, the onboard Segger of the devkit can be used externally on Nordic MCUs in custom products and is covered by the licensing agreement between Nordic and Segger for this usecase.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#38

Post by jLaForest »

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.

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

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#39

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

mardifoufs wrote: post #26
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…

Is risc-v really more power efficient at similar performance levels? I would think the ISA itself wouldn't matter that much for power efficiency, all things considered.

No, not inherently. The point is that simplicity and elegance enables efficiency.

Re: Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V

#40

Post by graphe »

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...

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.
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