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OnChip and SiFive, two groups aiming to develop and release RISC-V platforms, have announced they will collaborate. From OnChip's crowdfunding campaign:
Ever since SiFive's HiFive1 campaign was launched just a week after we launched Open-V back in November, we've both been getting a lot of questions about how we might collaborate. It's taken a while, as these things do, but we finally have a concrete answer we think will benefit everyone, not least the RISC-V community. Here's how we're collaborating:
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Open-V Will Use the SiFive E31 CPU Coreplex
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All Open-V Peripherals Will Be Compatible with SiFive Chips
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SiFive Will Donate Wafer Space in a May 2017 Tapeout
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OnChip Will Contribute to the Free Chips Project
Sounds like good news for those hoping for RISC-V and open hardware designs to become tangible objects.
Note that the SiFive HiFive1 campaign was successful and has already shipped to some backers while the OnChip OPEN-V campaign looks like it will not reach its goal.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday January 30 2017, @03:57PM
However, is the right way to go about furthering this technology to build low-powered microcontrollers, or is it to start at a level of computing that is more general purpose?
silicon is evolving faster than humanities applications for it, sooner or later the marketplace is inevitably going to be nothing but five cent microcontrollers as far as the eye can see.
I sometimes feel weird using a rasp pi to speak I2C to some devices, using a GHz to do a Z80's job or an arduino's job, but they're cheap and everywhere so thats going to be the future of computing. You want to blink an LED in 2030 its gonna take terabytes of IDE and libraries and 50 pages of OS dependent code and bad pushes out good so it'll be the only option in the marketplace, but on the bright side it'll be in a SOT-23 package and draw nanoamps and cost five cents so who cares?
Says the guy writing code in interpreted Lua on his ten or so dollar ESP8266 dev board last night. Today I can look at the clusterF of having to recompile the whole Lua based system just to add a simple driver for a magnetometer (long story) but at least today I can still say "F it" and overwrite it with arduino IDE pure C, which I'm probably gonna end up doing.
The trend of the last half century of making the simple even easier and the complicated more impossible than ever is only going to increase, which is annoying.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 30 2017, @04:43PM
The hell you say. Run Gentoo and say that again after a large update that includes Firefox, the kernel, mesa, llvm, and wine. I dunno if anyone's coined a law about it yet but code's inefficiency will always outpace silicon's efficiency.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 30 2017, @07:42PM
Yyyyyup. I lucked out this weekend and got my hands on an Elitebook 8470p...and a spare i7-3632QM CPU :D Chromium took three friggin' hours to compile, Libreoffice an hour and a half...that's scary.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:05AM
Around here (after one very loud rant quite a few years ago) that's known as Mehra's Law - "There is no amount of raw hardware performance that cannot be pissed away by shitty software."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Monday January 30 2017, @07:00PM
You want to blink an LED in 2030 its gonna take terabytes of IDE and libraries and 50 pages of OS dependent code ... but it'll be in a SOT-23 package and draw nanoamps and cost five cents
It's not exactly what you were thinking, but the PIC10F322 in a SOT23-6 package is $0.39 to $0.54 depending on quantity.
http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/PIC10F322 [microchip.com]
Not only have I used this chip to PWM an LED and generate various testing waveforms, it's handy for a ton of other things as well. It has an internal oscillator, an ADC, two PWM modules, a configurable logic cell, a complementary waveform generator (great for driving H bridges), a numerically controlled oscillator, and two timers. I taught myself to program microcontrollers from its datasheet and related references. Fun stuff.
Like you're saying, these things will just get more featureful. However, I doubt that there will ever be a time when you cannot program them in assembler. Arduino is already similar to what you were suggesting about using libraries to make microcontroller programming easier.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 30 2017, @08:32PM
Whoa...
These new PIC10F32X variants are based on the standard mid-range architecture (vs. the baseline for the PIC10F2XX family)
I made a little dev kit to play with the 10F2XX series some years ago and I see time marches on! That's quite a featureful little chip you've found there!
A 555 timer is about the same price now. A couple years back a 10F2XX cost more than a 555 but you could program it and reprogram it and it takes zero passives for a simple timer so arguably it came out ahead. The 10F2XX series being a bit crude and limited its a fair comparison...
I actually invested in a SMD ZIF socket for my 10F2XX project to make a little dev board thingy and I should see if its pin compatible with the 10F3XX series. Otherwise if you don't use a ZIF socket programmer you have to solder in a PICKIT header so you can program the darn thing.
I never did anything terribly useful with the 10F I was going to develop a little I2C talker that could squirt out config to something like a DDS oscillator so it kinda held its programming. You can buy COTS kits to do that. Much more elegantly (although larger) than my design. The qrplabs progrock is basically what I was going to make although much smaller of course, and an older generation DDS oscillator, for obvious reasons.
A lot of the fun of the 10F2XX was simply using the weirdest smallest little microcontroller I had ever used, just because. I could solder together something the size of an altoids tin that contains maybe 50 processors although I have no idea what I'd do with that...
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday January 30 2017, @09:19PM
I used microchip's programmer adapter to program the SOT23 chips:
http://www.microchip.com/Developmenttools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=AC163020 [microchip.com]
I just looked at the datasheets, and as far as ICSP is concerned, the 10F220/222 have the same pinout as the 10F320/322. I too chose this chip because it was so tiny and inexpensive. Amazing to see what something so small can be used for.
I'm also really fond of the 12F1571/1572.