Out in the real world, I know of cases where proprietary CPU or DSP IP was rejected in favor of RISC-V alternatives.
RISC-V may not change everything, but I do believe that it will change on thing in a major way: the financials of CPU IP such as Tensilica, Cortex-M0, ARC etc.
There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.
Edit: in the maker world, the so-called Blue Pill is incredibly popular. It has an STM32F103 SOC with a 72MHz Cortex M3 and tons of digital and analog interfaces. On AliExpress, these boards go for $1.60 a piece!
> There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.
Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.
Steve Jobs changed royalty model from a flat licensing fee to a $1 fee per port (insane!), Intel walked away and cancelled all FireWire development, Jobs lowered it then to $0.25 but Intel didn't come back.
It's also about friction. You can download the RISC-V design straight off github (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and start using it immediately. You don't have to phone up ARM or bring in lawyers to negotiate a license.
FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
Out in the real world, I know of cases where proprietary CPU or DSP IP was rejected in favor of RISC-V alternatives.
RISC-V may not change everything, but I do believe that it will change on thing in a major way: the financials of CPU IP such as Tensilica, Cortex-M0, ARC etc.
There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.
Edit: in the maker world, the so-called Blue Pill is incredibly popular. It has an STM32F103 SOC with a 72MHz Cortex M3 and tons of digital and analog interfaces. On AliExpress, these boards go for $1.60 a piece!
https://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill
> There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal.
Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.
$0.25 is very, very high.
I don't know who was supposed to pay the $0.25, but gizmos like external hard drives is a commodity market with razor thin gross margins.
Whoever decided that $0.25 was reasonable for that kind of market (Apple?) essentially killed the protocol right there.
Edit: here's the story: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of...
Steve Jobs changed royalty model from a flat licensing fee to a $1 fee per port (insane!), Intel walked away and cancelled all FireWire development, Jobs lowered it then to $0.25 but Intel didn't come back.
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It's also about friction. You can download the RISC-V design straight off github (https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip) and start using it immediately. You don't have to phone up ARM or bring in lawyers to negotiate a license.
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....it was a snarky movie quote from 1995. One that pops up in every thread about RISC-V
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
Without context, quotes from obscure movies from 1995 are a bit of a gamble!
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FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
"Yeah, RISC is good."
Fifth time's the charm.
hence the quotes.