Comment by titzer
2 days ago
It's crazy what $5 can buy you in a microcontroller these days. Have a look at these Milk-V boards:
The duo has up to 256MB of memory, and a 1TOPS@INT8 TPU. They run Linux and are $5. I bought 5!
2 days ago
It's crazy what $5 can buy you in a microcontroller these days. Have a look at these Milk-V boards:
The duo has up to 256MB of memory, and a 1TOPS@INT8 TPU. They run Linux and are $5. I bought 5!
Don't forget the 128 bit vector ISA with 32 registers, supporting up to 64 bit int and FP, and with LMUL=8 you can process 1024 bits with a single instruction (at 3 cycles per 128 bits for most operations). Fully supported by GCC and CLANG (xTHeadVector) and compatible with RVV 1.0 with just a command line switch if you use the C intrinsic functions. (a lot of code working on 8 bit elements is binary compatible with RVV 1.0 too e.g. typical memcpy(), memset(), memcmp(), strlen(), strcpy(), strcmp())
When I bought my 64 MB Duo they were $3!
Then for a long time they were $5 for the 64 MB, $7 for the 256 MB, and $10 for the 512 MB.
Sadly, like everything else, they've gone up considerably this year.
https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo
https://arace.tech/products/milkv-duo-s
Meaning, minus possible required bug fixes, all the frontend languages supported on a full instal of either GCC or LLVM.
The wild thing is that this SoC is a heterogenous compute device. It has three different kinds of cores: a pretty beefy arm64 core and two different RISC-V cores: a 1Ghz one for running Linux and a 700Mhz one dedicated to running a real-time operating system. The arm64 core can also run its own OS.
2 replies →
You can buy sub-$0.50 microcontrollers. But even at $5, I don't know why you'd want to run models on them, it's an environment constrained to the point of being useless for this task.
And I hope it stays that way, I don't want MCU shortages...
Many artificial environments are useless to tasks they were not designed for until somebody experiments, tests, redesigns, and iterates.
I'll give a specific example apropos of TFA. Computer vision models were never run on MCUs because they were constrained to the point of being useless for this task, but then someone tried the impractical, and now it's trivial[1]
Regarding MCU shortages, you should be worried about the supply chain, but I don't see the impact really being from running LLMs on ESP-32s, of all things.
[1]: https://github.com/espressif/esp-vision
Fun and learning is a really good reason. It also reminds me of the damascene: trying to achieve something that doesn't feel possible, and working through all the extreme resource-constrained engineering limits.
I think most of my embedded projects aren't that useful, but they've taught me a lot.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think this goes beyond impractical, it's doomed from the get go.
In my book, impractical means "I built a cuckoo wristwatch". Beyond impractical: "I built a cuckoo wristwatch but there was no room for a working mechanism".
2 replies →
How is it useless? If it has an NPU it is literally built to run models.
You're just extremely biased in what you consider to be a useful ML model. For example, for some strange reason you think only LLMs exist. The model must be as big as possible or else it is pointless.
Training custom non-LLM models for specific tasks so they run on a resource constrained device? You must be insane.
There's a neat project out there that can read your water meter into home assistant using an ESP32+camera+computer vision. I imagine a small TPU like this could be very useful for similar projects. More compute means higher resolutions and more reliability.
Interested in this. Link please
1 reply →
I want to run music models on the Milk-V and have them jam in realtime with me.
isn't floor price 0.10$ for last couple years?
Well, that's sub-$0.50. But yeah, CH32V003 is in that ballpark, and some of the cheapest Microchip and Infineon products are around $0.20.
It's almost never worth it to buy the cheapest chip unless you're making a million of something, but there are very good ones around $1-$2, and $5 is the upscale stuff.
There are 2 cent microcontrollers.
Used in the cheapest devices you wouldn't even imagine to contain any software - eg. To control a touch sensitive on-off switch.
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I bought 5!
What are you going to do with 120 of them?
A compute cluster for generating bad math jokes.
Which is why folks should stop thinking that coding in Assembly, or C is the only way, as if microcontrollers were stuck in the 80s hardware.
Heck, that one would have no issue running Xerox PARC OSes.
Naturally there are still use cases were a PIC with 4KB would be the best option, but lets not behave as if there isn't anything better in most cases.
It really puts into perspective how much of a leech ARM has been on the entire industry. What being a monopoly does to a mfer.
I think that is pretty ungenerous. Before ARM, ISAs were not a commodity, and there were only closed, proprietary implementations of them (usually from a single vendor). Arm licensing its IP and actual designs was hugely beneficial for the broader ecosystem and led to their prevalence in the embedded space. The toolchain and software network effect made it a no-brainer to either reach for a completed Arm design, contract a customized one, or build your own.
The arm experiment ran its course though; the power one vendor had in the marketplace started to be abused for the benefit of the IP holder and detriment to others. Now RISC-V is going one step further with a completely open ISA and also completely open designs. This is an excellent development in the nick of time.
I wonder how Apple feels about arm64 and RISC-V now. They could have probably bought ARM at any point but maybe never considered it to avoid anti-monopoly blowback.
Sure, because the jungle of 8, 16 and 32 bit microcontrollers stuck on 1980's mindset was so much better.
Also you can reach out to ESP32 as alternative, plenty of maker projects using them.