Great video! Thank you for starting from first principles and including the business interest side of things. I started my career in semiconductors (pre-silicon verification, architecture, and design). I really enjoy the way you explained and simplified the overall market and motivations. I will gladly point to your videos in the future when friends ask to understand the concepts you presented.
I have NEVER EVER EVER gotten so much value from a single TH-cam video EVER! Words will never evolve to a place where it is enough to express how grateful and thankful I am to you for this video (,and neither will bytes lol. )
Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM could drive other licensees away, perhaps towards RISC-V. This is because ARM doesn’t allow licensees to make nonstandard changes to the architecture, while it appears Nvidia is looking to do just that. Being the owner of ARM, it will be the only vendor able to do that, which would give it an unfair competitive advantage. That will antagonize the other vendors, and encourage them to look for alternatives.
Sorry ... that is just NOT TRUE as written. ARM has different licenses, which support different types of usage of the ARM core designs. And if you look at what they have been doing in the last year alone, you will see that they have been lowering the entry barrier into making new designs... for eg they have this design start kit that lets a company take a cortex m core as bitstream (can burn it but not alter it) and then make their own custom extensions around it that they can either simulate of burn onto an fpga. This is how the RP2040 PIO was designed. You can buy the fpga board on digikey for 995$ and download the cortex m images for free today. But yes, in comparison an iCE40 board is 60$ and the risc-c core come in xhdl, python or scala code. But companies wanting to do things have always been able to do it... the statement that nvidia ‘will be the only vendor...’ is entirely without merit, but it does soud geat ... fud always does ;-) DISCLAIMER: I am neither pro nor against anything... I just like to give people FACTS rather than my own opinions.That is why I like and respect Andreas’ work so much!
@@Alperic27 Nvidia now owns ARM, as licenses expire they’re free to rewrite the rules. If you don’t like the new rules, fine, don’t use the chip. No other options? Meh, Nvidia won’t care. You’re analysis relies on the fact you believe Nvidia will play by the rules. It’s been proven they won’t.
@@c1ph3rpunk well Daren.... sorry, but nvidia DOES NOT own ARM... that IS A FACT... which I invite you to NOT BELIEVE ME ABOUT, and VERIFY YOURSELF. An acquisition of that magnitude is a BIG deal, and the FTC has an equally long and complex review process BEFORE the acquisition can be allowed. So, if you check, you will see that the process has entered phase 2, where nvidia and softbank are required to answer some questions about their intentions and other modalities. If you have checked, you also know that Qualcomm has raised an opposition in multiple jurisdictions against the sell, as well as ... Huawei .. and I think at least another chineese company. So.... ARM has not changed hands yet, and information is more than opinions ;-)
As I thought more about this, I think you may have the causality links all wrong: ARM does not prevent changes. ARM sells licenses that support making changes. They cost a lot of money because 1) ARM wanted to avoid fragmentation 2) this kind of license give access to IP that has cost millions and millions to develop over 30 years... BUT.. more importantly, there is the question of WHO/WHY want to make some changes to this IP? The easiest way to understand that is to look at who makes changes today, or who is jumping early on RISK-V. WD as an eatly adopter: what they want is to have a consistent toolchain to build some highly specialized chips (controllers). So to them, and many others who are doing specialized chips, they dont want to have a complete arm8 or arm9 core, much less all the interconnect to have multiple cores on a single die.... for them the base risc-v core ISA (integer) is plenty... that and the decoding/execution pipeline that goes with it. for these people, a full ARM license is very costly for very little value as they most likely want to remove functionality rather than modify any of it. Of course there are the ones who may want to add some specialised ports to handle some tasks tasks in the hardware... but these people can do it today .. the rp2040 likely did not require a full license for the rpi foundation to design the PIO peripheral. So, to fridge vendors wanting you to be able to manage it from the internet, most ARM cores are overkill.. therefore I believe that the ‘but the license is expensive’ argument is bogus.... if you have ever worked with fpga/xHDL then you may have seen that copying IP from opencores for your own design is not always easy (maybe it is just that I deeply suck at it), so the ‘oh but look, the IP will be reusable accross designs’ seems to me also dubious. the ‘not invented here syndrome’ will likely lead to more ‘yeah momy look i shared my cpu design on github’ than it will to ‘let me reuse this intelligently designed IP core’. much of the opensource code on github is IMHO of bad to deplorable quality, so the same could happen with HW designs that will be filled with statically defined multipliers/divider constants that could make porting any parts a nightmare
Actually the title was a bit misleading, I thought I would not spare that much time to watch that content, and shelved it. Got a bit of time and get acquainted with very thoughtful and well researched review covering very many aspects of technology, business and history of electronic developments. Excellent video Andreas, a real gem.
@@AndreasSpiess I perceived the video would be mainly dedicated to the ESP32-C3 that does not have a robust toolchain at the moment thus not my piece of cake. The video was so much more than that. I would like to add one consideration to your CISC vs RISC discussion that was far from evident to me : CISC was not an oversight; at the time RAM was so expensive that it was much more economical to make the processor as sophisticated as possible to reduce the required code RAM footprint. (Just compare the number of FETs spent in a recent megaprocessor.com design on the decent 16 bits CPU and paltry 256 B memory.) The step change came along with the Gordon Moore's observation that was actually related to RAM chips. When there was enough fast RAM, design effort became focused on the CPU, and now the memory is lagging behind processors hence caches.
You are right with the expensive memory. And before RISC, nobody talked about CISC. We just had microprocessors. Only when RISC appeared they talked about CISC.
@@AndreasSpiess Yes, coining the term RISC undeniably helped promoting the concept of having more registers and exchange data with the memory using the dedicated instructions only. But it could be confusing to those who joined the party later.
Happy Birthday! Lots of health and a hundreds years of life! We wish you that your films have the greatest possible reach :) And of course thank you for your creativity! You really help us :)
Quite a comprehensive and detailed overview. The future looks very interesting with this kind of development. Looking forward to see the next experiments.
Interesting and informative - have been in the IT industry (mostly Linux-related stuff) for longer than I want to admit, still learned several new things from this video. Your presentation of so much history/material is organized, coherent, and easy to follow. Well done!
What a great summary. I think this should be compulsory viewing for engineers at university as not only does give a great statement on RISK 5 but a history lesson as well. A Brilliant episode. Thank you. Simon
Wow, this is an awesome video. It’s packed full of insight, including some thoughtful ones concerning industry and company strategy. The video is only 25 minutes long, but I feel us viewers are benefitting from years of experience and knowledge. I just wonder how many hours (even years) you spent in the making of this video. Thank you for sharing. What a gift to the community. Truly Open Source!
Thank you for your very nice words! Indeed it took nearly my whole life to create this video.
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For me the RISC-V based ESP32-C3 is interesting, because for RISC-V there's already an official LLVM backend present, which allows coding in alternate languages like Rust. That's not currently possible on Xtensa, and they seem to have little interest to complete one. (I know there's an official repository, but it moves really slowly).
Is this also the case for the periphery like WiFi ?
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@@AndreasSpiess I'm not familiar with how the WiFi stack operates on the ESP32-C3, but afaik Espressif ported all the necesarry code of their custom FreeRTOS SDK for the RISC-V architecture, and that contains the usual API calls for the WiFi stack. Rust compiles to native through LLVM so as long there's binding for the API calls, it should be possible to access all things similarly. I don't think there's such ESP32-C3 specific Rust bindings at the moment, but it's only a matter of time, and a more skilled person could probably autogenerate that from the C headers. For the RTL8710 there's the freertos_rs crate for similar purposes: polyfractal.com/post/rustl8710/
Dear Andreas 10:12 ... totally Correct! and there was not even the need to continue the video ... that would suffice to make a Great video :) :) ... A bit of numbers: - Linux is 90% + of all major Web server. - 90% of all Smartphones. - 99% of all Large display Tv's ... yes inside they all have a ARM-Based Linux CPU. - 99% of all Supercomputers. - 90%+ of all Automotive Smart-drive and multimedia onboard cars. - 95+ % of all Home Routers and multimedia stand-alone hardware. ... Linux RULES! :):) Great video Andreas once again, but ... some parts of it would by themselves required Hundreds of hours of videos ... specially those regarding the architecture wars and OS-wars ... oh boy that was a big part of the last 4 decades on the Tech world! But you warned everyone the subjects mentioned were super-simplified ..so it's ok. Great video!
I agree with the hundreds of hours. This fact made it not easier to create this video ;-) Your Linux Chart remembered me of the statistics of the first browsers... They were similar. And a few years later, Netscape was dead and Chrome king. I am curious what we will see in the future...
@@AndreasSpiess It is indeed the history of Technology "battles" of the last decades, a very complex subject over which many many books have been written and many more will come I'm sure. About the future it is clear who won by the statistics I mentioned. It is by now Totally Irreversible. Since early 90's I knew Linux would be the future and by then I had to install MS-DOS first in order to know hardware driver parameters, only after that I was able to install Linux. But the issue remains, All Architectures are supported by Linux. Other then the Desktop with Strong Application dependency on MS platform all new contenders will search for something that is Open-Source, not because of Open-source itself but rather because that automatically creates a huge advantage on their ecosystem ... like in the case of the IBM and SUN DEC ... Platform makers know that they can either create their own little niche platform and end up like IBM/SUN or ..appeal to the entire developer community and offer Open Source Access to all in order to gain the most traction. Cost of entry is lower and giving everyone a Standard platform is a tremendous advantage for New system. No new contender on Any new Technology will ever come out again with proprietary stuff (I mean they will but it is doomed to failure) ... also Extending Linux Support for your hardware instantly gives your Hardware access to Everything All others developed for all other Platforms. It is a huge Leap forward from the get go. Moreover the most likely scenario is that some years ahead Linux dominance on the areas mentioned will extend into the Desktop also. Anyone with simple knowledge of IT could today install Linux as a primary OS, run Virtualbox for example for one or two MS-only Applications. I agree that obviously Chrome would kill Firefox simply because for each PC sold there are 3 smartphones sold ..all with Chrome installed ... But even like that Firefox is ahead of All MS browsers all versions of edge and they come pre-instaled ... In the case of OS choice and support there is no way out today of what Linux has achieved ... Linus Torvalds once said that Linux Wins the Day Microsoft becomes a major Kernel Contributor ... Biggest corporate code contributor to Linux Kernel since about 4 years ... Microsoft! Complete and total Surrender. The fact remains Andreas, for every PC sold (almost all with Windows less then 10% with iOS) ... 5 Linux devices are sold ! (Mostly smartphones) ... All of the Biggest companies on the world are fully behind Linux ... they range from HP, Oracle, IBM (acquired Red Hat), Intel, AMD, Samsung, Western Digital, even big Banks ..you name it. NVIDIA acquired ARM (SoftBank had huge problems because of their Lunacy investing on the We Company they were "forced" to sell ARM to cope with the losses )... 80% of ARM revenue comes from Linux-Based sales. ARM sells hugely Because of Linux on Smartphones. NVIDIA will be forced to hugely increase their support to Linux ... at least on ARM ... The momentum has turned hugely, and what I've foreseen in the early 90's is now coming into plain view.
I agree and it shows how important the "standardization on the lower level" is. I am not sure if only the open source aspect of Linux was important. I think it was also important that many big companies on the higher level contributed, as I mentioned in the video. BTW: I am still a heavy Windows user because it works. Linux, unfortunately does not work for me as soon as a leave the Raspberry world. And I think, I am not a complete idiot :-( It is still not made for the masses.
@@AndreasSpiess Yes I get what you are saying. My opinion is formed on the basis of the Consequences for big companies of the Open Source Model ... Let's imagine you get the finance to make a Brand New from the ground up Hardware Ecosystem ... Chips, Hardware ..the all lot. You get the backing of a Major Corporation, say IBM for example, they call you and say : Andreas your mission is simple: Destroy ARM ! :) :) we want all their sales ..no More NVIDIA nagging on us! You are going to spend a Lot of time developing your hardware from the ground up, like in the our present example on a RISC-V architecture. Then comes the problem ... are you also going to Spend Even more time and resources Making Everything useful for that Hardware, that is Software, from the ground up? That is, all drivers for All other Hardware like network cards, video, sound, displays, peripherals all connectivity and telecom stack , from TCP/IP to everything else. All web protocols ... Everything Has to be built from Scratch ... If you Adopt Linux you not only get Literally ALL available Hardware (ALL Hardware) as well as the Most Rock Solid implementations of Everything Else ... fromTCP/IP all the way to ftp/ssh/http/File Systems/image and sound and video formats and processing ... everything ... you would have instantly after building the hardware and adopting and adapting your hardware to the Linux Kernel you would get the Most Rock Solid and Extended Software Stack instantly running on your platform as well as the Even Bigger ... User Space Application Stack! All of that Rock Solid, massively Certified and ... the magic word for any Corporation: Instantly And Free ... you would get the Software Ecosystem instantly for Free (very low cost at least many thing have to be adapted of course). Most importantly ..that Software ecosystem si evry time the number one Choice for Developers ... the most Important aspect of all. - Or, Scenario 2: You turn to the Big Corp overlords and break then the "good news": Ok, we will make our Own Software Stack that No One Knows about, (No Developer will spend a second on that even if the Hardware was for free ...) And we will spend the next 10-15 years on Developers and another 10 Years developing a New OS (full of bugs .. ) ..oh and let's hope developers see some traction on the hardware sales to justify any user Space Application development ... What do you think the Big Corporations would accept? And to their question but but ... it's Open Source ... how can we "protect our IP" ... the answer is simple: Why protect something No ONE would want to buy 15 year from now? Loose 15 years of Huge Work and in the end after seeing all platforms Standardizing surrender it all? It's a hands down choice at this moment. About your Linux in the desktop experience. I know it is more complex and requires more time than windoze. But I use Linux since 1997 and as a Full Time Primary Desktop since 2002 on a 64Bit AMD ..Windows did not even had half-decent 64 bit support until 2006 .... and it is all a matter of spending some time learning the tricks on the OS. I also Save a lot time because i do not know what a anti-virus program is ... my hardware last much much longer and if you get VirtualBox you have the Best of Both worlds although every time more I get less and less need to go to VirtualBox and run Windows inside it. Also I consider the Raspberry Pi several OS's very very lame when compared to Real Distros Like OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like ... of course the Desktop of choice on RPi can not be a KDE or Gnome ...
I think we do not need to agree. Future will tell. In this video I tried to focus on history and tried to explain what happened and my interpretation about it. Maybe I am wrong in some places. One thing is sure: I am not good in predicting. As Einstein (or somebody else) said: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
I will ask a stupid question.... what do you think it will allow that cannot be done today? .... .. .... dont get me wrong.. I love to read assembly language.. and understanding how to build my own add-2-then-substract-5 machine instruction was a very ... pointless but exiting experience.... but most people here will only ever program their boards in C or python... so they will NEVER see if they run on a risk-v, mips or arm core.... simple fact. but i love the name risc-v, it sounds much cooler (forget that it just means it was their 5th time defining a new ISA for teaching) you want to truly FEEL empowered today? Learn to program the RP2040 PIO... and do it in C, not in python ;-)
@@Alperic27 Understandable. But in the grand scheme of things, widespread adoption will hopefully see more custom Soc being made. For example, there are already many companies working on RISC-V cores for AI workloads. And most of these companies will end writing APIs for them. As an end result, I would hope, that I don't need to buy a Jetson Nano, but rather something much cheaper even if it has 1/10 the performance. Right now there are not much others which can do that. Like your said, most users will still be using C, and that's good IMO, especially for beginners.
@@alkmst-xyz I apologize if my remark may sound ‘antagonistic’, let me assure you it is not my intention... I honnestly think that most people do not understand what risc-v is or means for the future Again I ask: for what tangible benefit? ‘Core’ is a misleading word that covers multiple realities. For eg, the jetson nano soc contains 4 a57 ARM cores, which make it a full blown general purpose cpu. That part has nothing to do at all with the ML part which is made of 128 maxwell cores (these are completely different core from the base risc-v integer core for eg). The maxwell core are not covered in the risc-c modular core IP, and the fact that many companies are building new AI cores will not change that. Burning them into a discrete asic or as part of an soc does not change what they are or how they work... risc-v, mips or anything else has zero influence here. Neither does having an API has anything to do with what an ISA is or does. Another eg: today coral is a dedicated asic that can be programmed with a library or used transparently in a tensorflow model. The only reason why people have not made more asics is that 1) the knowledge is scarce, 2) the manufacturing is expensive... not that people cannot do it, or need to risc-v ISA to be able to finally do it... truly unrelated!! Google chose to package coral either as a complete board with a NXP quad a53 core soc or as a simple usb dongle. Adafruit is also prototyping a spi (think i made a mistake here.. could be I2C) board with the coral asic. Now the intersection with risc-v will at best be that 1) someone will make an ISA extension for ML to expose some low level tensor operators to abstract what the coral asic or the maxwell cores do (via the nvidia libs), or 2) the next generation of coral-like asic may be replaced with SOCs like nvidia did with jetson... but that may actually mean LESS FREEDOM... as the main cpu will be chosen by the soc vendor.... I much prefer to have more coral like solutions where I can even attach it to my Raspberry PI if I want, instead of being limited to use whatever the soc will contain. But yes... there will be another benefit that you have not mentioned: IF people share some ML ISA extensions, then you and I will be able to burn them ourselves onto an ECP5 class fpga alongside a pico-32 or rocket core, and .... and what? .... we will have to wait for someone to also opensource the tensorflow library that will use these new instruction, and more importantly wait for them to be supported in the GCC backend......... .... but it will be fun, when it happens... in a couple years? Until then, tinyml can do a lot of things on a simple arm core.
@Alperic27 First off, don't worry, I feel like we are having a healthy discussion:) I understand the confusion regarding my use of "core". What I meant is that, in general, more people (who have the knowledge to design custom cores) can create application-driven SOCs; But of course if not for the mass market, it would not make a ton of sense to do that. Companies like Esperanto are working on this kind of stuff (they created a RISC-V based SoC with 1000+ cores targeted towards ML workload for server-side application). I agree that the coral is a good platform, and deserves more recognition (I am planning on getting one of those Coral Modules/ dev board for some vision-based projects). Right now, TensorFlow (Lite) Micro is still a work in progress; last I checked they are still porting most of the operations from TensorFlow Lite. Hopefully, we get a standalone TensorFlow package for Microcontrollers. TBH it seems that you know much more about these things than me; I am more of an applications person who doesn't have to care what ISA it is using. Nevertheless, it is exciting to see some competition for ARM.
Just want to tell you that I quite appreciate your detailed reviews of these new devices. They simplify the job of selecting appropriate processors and sensors.
Very good analysis of what is going on behind the curtains, makers are always so deep involved in their projects that they so not know what is coming from where. It is very difficult to find all these information in one place like your video and surely this will help makers to make decisions if/when they want to go for business. thanks for the deliting "nerd" videos I watch every sunday morning.!
12:44 I always thought ARM was build out from Acorn ( producers of the BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes) and that Apple got interested in RISC much later.
The original ARM architecture was created by Acorn as the "Acorn RISC Machine"; they did a couple versions on their own and then spun out the processor design team as a joint venture with Apple and VLSI Technology as Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. in 1990. So, Acorn, Apple, and VLSI all owned some share of the original ARM spin-out business. Apple was interested in using the architecture as the CPU in the Newton. In 1998, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ with a name change as ARM Ltd. They remained an independent company until purchased by SoftBank in 2016, and in Sept 2020 Nvidia announced plans to purchase them from SoftBank, though that's not yet finalized.
There was also a period of Acorn ownership by Olivetti - best known as a dot matrix printer manufacturer I think. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember ARM IP was not included in the Olivetti deal though.
@@iwbnwif Olivetti was originally a typewriter maker, but they got involved with computers early on and made one of the first transistorized mainframes. Adriano Olivetti, the son of the founder of the Olivetti company, created the semiconductor foundry SGS to make reliable diodes and transistors for Olivetti's mainframes. SGS later merged with Thompson Semiconductors to form the company we now know as STMicroelectronics!
Brings me back. I worked on Unix compilers from 88 to 95. I worked on every RISC chip mentioned, plus Intel and Motorola CISC. You covered it very well.
Grüzi Andreas ! I'm watching your videos in an intermittent kind for some time now and must admit that it always had been fun to listen to your staements. I learnt a lot. But this video is prepared excellently - even 2 years after it was released ! Great job ! Keep on doing like this !
I think it's worth noting that pretty much no semiconductor manufacturer uses a single ISA across their whole product line. The Maker community tends to have a somewhat narrow view of the world of CPUs and MCUs based on what's in PCs, powerful consumer gadgets like phones, and things that have been associated with some Open Source projects before. This is for pretty good reasons; you tend to have to pay a lot of money for development tools outside this little slice of the processor world, and they're marketed to specific kinds of companies. But they make up really significant parts of the whole semiconductor ecosystem, so you have to be careful about assuming the importance of one ISA family like ARM even if it's completely dominating the Maker-visible parts of the semiconductor world right now. RISC-V definitely has the potential to eat into the share of the market that ARM currently dominates, but as you noted, the ISA itself is only a very tiny part of the picture. ARM provides not just an ISA, but several reference design implementations of it, a number of bus architecture designs to connect various kinds of peripherals, a line of GPU designs, etc. This stuff is very mature and very well supported with 3rd party hardware IP and software. It's going to continue to dominate in parts that are meant for end-user programming for a while! RISC-V is going to first take over where companies need CPU cores to run the internals of some in-house hardware design. You can see this from the interest shown by Seagate, Western Digital, Nvidia, etc. It's going to run inside the *peripherals* of computers first, where users mostly won't even be aware that there's a CPU involved at all. I think it might also stand a chance of being relevant to "hyperscaler" data center hardware, where PC-born bus architecture standards are in place already and there's a ton of cash to burn on long-term projects that'll result in cutting out ARM license costs in the long run, and the software stacks are internally-maintained by armies of programmers. I can also see Apple looking at RISC-V for future gadgets; cutting ARM license fees out of products where possible seems like a very Apple thing to do. Espressif choosing RISC-V for its ESP8266-replacement follows along these same lines; if you remember when the ESP8266 first hit the Maker scene, it wasn't really meant to be user-programmable; it was just a super-cheap WiFi chip you could hook up to an Ardunio via serial and control via AT commands. A lot of radio chips are designed like this; they take care of some layers of the radio protocol on their own, and you communicate with them over some serial bus from a more powerful MCU. Their choice of a weird Tensilica CPU architecture doesn't really hurt anything if they're the only ones coding for it, and switching to RISC-V makes it even more accessible now that Makers have exposed the usefulness of the chips when loaded with custom firmware. Don't think for a minute that STMicroelectronics is wedded to ARM, or that they won't embrace RISC-V if they see a benefit to it. They embraced some odd architectures in the past, and they still have a sizable line of 8-bit STM-8 and automotive Power MCUs. There may not end up being a reason, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
I agree with your statements. And I am far from saying that ARM is dead. I am too old and saw many such wars. I tried to give an update from today's point of view and hope, I di not do too much prediction for the future.
Very, VERY well done ! A top illustration of "Gesunder Menschenverstand" and how simple the world can become when you have learned how to use common sence.
I made a video about MicroPython 2 years ago. There you see my position. But you can also reads the comments. You do not find another MicroPython video on this channel since :-( But with the appearance of Pi Pico it might change...
An important issue for RISC-V is the fact, that chinese companies have to get independant from American-owned IP. And this is an issue for European companies and countries as well, as it might become a topic in trade wars and a subject of manipulation of NSA and friends. Thus it is quite a good idea to become somewhat independant from American-owned IP at least in critical infrastructures.
That was amazing coverage! You're always awesome Mr. Spiess! I have lots to consider now. My stomach turned when I heard Nvidia bought ARM. I didn't see how that was good for anyone except Nvidia, if it's even good for them in the long-run to survive the blowback. Many IT I know are buying up AMD because they perceive Nvidia to start bullying more, and they wish to stay flexible.
As a teen, many years ago, I along with two other friends were avid photography fans. We each bought SLR cameras ... but different brands. I had a Pentax, one friend had a Nikon, and the other a Canon. We often spent hours upon hours, as young people do, debating the merits of one system vs the other. But in truth, functionally these cameras were virtually identical. Except of course, they were completely incompatible with each other. Nikon lenses, filters etc. fit only Nikon cameras etc. There were other camera companies as well, which were similarly incompatible. They all deliberately avoided any standard ... presumably to force customers to buy only their products. Then Tamron came along, introducing the t-mount and a whole series of 'really great' lenses, which could be universally fit on any of these cameras, simply by switching inexpensive t-mounts. Tamron came into existence and thrived, by exploiting the lack of standardization in the camera industry. ... and so it continues.
A very good example how non-standard things can destroy value. You three probably only needed one particular good lens. Like that, non of you had one. But you had three very similar sets for the same price...
@@AndreasSpiess The problem with lenses and optics is that most coupling rings do not permit focus out to infinity. The Tamron improvement was making the lense infinity available using their flexible lenses. Exit barrier is the lock-in mechanism.
@@AndreasSpiess I just re-watched your video and have a few more comments. You made the point that RISC-V is a competitor to ARM. I think there's another reason RISC-V will soon take off. The USA seems determined to deny China access to technology, presumably to protect American IP and security concerns. It's not a simple question of royalties, China may not have access to ARM at all. This is forcing them to seek alternatives, and RISC-V is an obvious solution. By denying access, the USA may inadvertently unleash a flood of cheap alternatives to the market, which could come back and bite them. Forcing your opponents to innovate, may have unintended consequences. For the rest of us however, this may be the beginning of a huge opportunity. For the past 2 weeks I've been tinkering with some ESP32-C3 modules which I recently bought on AliExpress for around CAD$3 each. My goal was to set up an environment for RISC-V assembler programming, including hardware debugging. I've done this on Eclipse and can tell you that it works great, especially since the ESP32-C3 chip includes an onboard hardware JTAG debugger (super easy to use.) And ... as you suggest, there is also a LOT of additional functionality on these chips besides just the open source RISC-V ISA. Setting up the environment is not for beginners, but others have done it, and there is a fair amount of information available for those wanting to try. For beginners, these are still very powerful and super affordable boards, which are fully supported on Arduino etc. My point is, 'now' might be a real good time to start embracing RISC-V.
I graduated math/computer science at UCLA in 1981. At that time there actually *were* multiple architectures and diverse ecosystems. The curriculum *never* discussed economics or how engineers fit into ecosystems. This huge blind-spot helped monopolies like ibm/intel/microsoft crush creativity. Thank you for your always excellent content.
Great presentation, I learned a bunch of stuff that I hadn't before, despite my obsession with tech videos. Anyway, I understand your disappointment about the amount of open source on the silicon, but the piece that IS open source, I think, is exciting enough to still make it pretty exciting. That common standard you talked about will provide a free means to compatibility for a vast number of companies, and hopefully, software! I'm happy to wait for more open source silicon, because of the possibilities we will have now! unless I misunderstand something, which could easily happen here!
@@AndreasSpiess not sure how to translate correctly to English... but once I hear great way to distinguish: great businessman is always immoral beast. If you see businessman who is good man, probably he is bad businessman...
Thanks for the great lecture. I feel like I just got an introductory lesson for a computer engineering degree for free. Very interesting and informative. And apparently it is your birthday. Congratulations!
Andreas, I think you are spot on. I do think that you missed the part of history where people discovered that you could do general purpose computing on small microprocessors. Many of the hobby computer people used Motorola chips at that point (and some Texas Instruments). The primary ecosystem was CP/M. The combination of IBM getting into the business of personal computing and Apple's meteoric growth created a business vector that essentially killed all the CP/M companies. Indirectly you said "Business forces standardization, Engineers abhor it." I started my computer career in the early '70s and can only say that it is the natural ying/yang of people who create vs people who control. Thanks for the terrific video on RISC-V. Very well done.
You are right, I could have started earlier. But the early developments were not too important for my story about RiscV. As said, I had to destill a lot!
You save me a lot of time Andreas. I was planning on investing much time in purchasing a RISC-5 board and understanding it as best I could. I will spend my time else ware. I learned so much.
I really love this video. Has explained in a systematic manner with basics. Edit: Can't imagine the amount of research needed for presenting this complex of a topic so appetizing.
@@AndreasSpiess thank you so much! I have not worked with microcontrollers since a lot of time and yesterday with you videos I discovered the ESP32 familiy OMG! 😍 it is beautiful!
Excellent! I really appreciate the historical background (even if very subjective and abbreviated) and the effort you put into explaining the economic context.
Excellent video. I think we will see more open source chip designs, e.g. coming from not-for-profit organisations like LowRISC where all the RTL is open source. You can also get chips manufactured for the order of €10k or so through Europractice, which is doable for University research projects that might want to add new experimental features to an open source RISC-V core, which is not something you can do with an ARM core. A couple of minor corrections: you usually hand off GDSII to a chip foundry, not RTL; Windows NT was supported on DEC Alpha.
Thank you for the video and the pointer for the ESP32-C3 device. What's interesting is that Expressif includes a RISC-V core in the ESP32-S2 as an alternative for the "ULP" - ultra low power processor. It only has access to a limited bit of memory, but at least a developer can use a real compiler and to write programs for it, rather than hand-assembling "instructions" for the simple state-machine low-power co-processor in the original ESP32. I wonder if that was a "test run" for Expressif in integrating the RISC-V IP into their designs and fab processes?
Happy birthday Doctor Spiess, here from Brazil, Afranio(father) and Caio(son)!! Thank you for teaching us so much content! Health and Peace! God bless you!
Thanks a lot, Maestro! One of the advantages of living in the south of the world, is that I can wake-up early on Sundays and have my coffee ☕️ following this fantastic channel. Today was a must! Greetings 🖖 from 🇨🇱 (by a Brazilian 🇧🇷 ;-)
Excellent video. It could be a graduation class!! Congratulation on the organization of the content and brilliant clear definition and explanation of such important concepts!!
I am 8:22 into this video and just because your explanations are so entertaining and simple, I hit the subscribe button. Well done, very well done. I am looking forward to see the rest of the video, now :-D
Good video and full of truth. I liked best how you concisely said that every company wants to commoditize the layer below them. And also if you follow the money you will understand the motivations. I couldn't agree more!
Very interesting video, going to be interesting to see how this market changes over the next few years. To stay in business these days you have to deliver value (Yes, more than just offer), which means providing the customers with the product and service which works for them. That's a mouthful right there. Thanks for the awesome show which I look forward to on Sunday afternoons. Best regards, South Africa
I think you missed a particularly interesting RV chip- the K210. Dual core 600MHz 64 bit with FPU, 8MB of RAM, and numerous accelerators for audio recognition, AI, and so forth. Very inexpensive and available in several different SBCs from Sipeed for around $20-30 that include a color LCD, micro SD, VGA camera, onboard microphone and stereo audio amplifier. It has 64 I/O ports as well, though many are dedicated. It ships natively with microPython and is very powerful, not sure how successful they were after their Kickstarter that I tried, but I had a very positive experience.
Unfortunately, I do not see a lot of projects using the K210 even it is an impressive chip. Libraries and projects are very important for the acceptance of hardware in the Maker community.
I knew a lot of this stuff, having lived through it the first time, but I really like how well you put the pieces together. I am very interested in the implications of new technologies and your perspective is very helpful.
I’m a little behind on your content, but I get to it eventually. Thanks for making such great content Andreas. I really appreciate your detailed analysis and it was interesting and useful!
In a led driver that I've bought recently there was a chip BL602 from Bouffalo labs. It's also a Risc V chip and probably suits well for large volumes. So, maybe is the new path for some embedded devices. Two months ago I wanted to investigate. But on the other hand also Expressif is about to launch the ESP32-S3 that seems impressive (at least on paper) and also comes with a Risc V low power processor. I think I'll wait for it.
10:00 Hi, there is a little error, Windows on ARM is available since Windows 8 RT. Before RT there was Windows CE, i know, not a "real" Windows, which also worked on PowerPC, MIPS, ARM and x86. So there was or is still a support from Microsoft, not the best, but it is there :)
It's nice the ISA is open at least. Have to start somewhere. I look forward to seeing you experiment with it! I always learn something watching your videos. Thanks!
aaaah! I thought you were speaking about the ESP32-S3 in the last video, not the C3 Version :D Ok, I'm gonna watch this! But the mentioning of FPGA already excites me! edit: very cool video, thanks for that overview! I'm sure, i'll also stick to the Sx Line of the ESP32 series. But I'd love to see some more of FPGA stuff in the maker scene :D
1. I do not have any S3 chips (so far) 2. Unfortunately I did not find a lot of cool Maker projects for FPGA where you do not need a Ph.D. to understand them :-(
@@AndreasSpiess I hope you get one of them soon :) 👍 in the end you are the most known swiss maker! Hmm I know one cool project! FPGA based Ethereum miner! I think there are even HDL sources for that available 🤔 And if not.. oh well, it's never too late for PhD XD
Understanding all that is one thing - presenting it so others can get a grasp of what you are talking about is another thing . Thanks for the distilled alcohol !
"If we want flexibility in one level, we have to standardize the level below"
Wow, never thought about it this way, great observation.
It is universal and most people, particularly architects do not know it. Very bad...
@@AndreasSpiess Your high level view of the world and systems around us is priceless.
though some might not think so, this video was very practical.
Metoo
yes, the ability to explain things in such a relatively simpler way speaks to the experience and overall knowledge of the narrator.
Can we standardize the microcode level then? 😁
I love standards, because there are so many to choose from.
I am not sure if we agree...
As long as they aren't all incompatible with each other! Esp32 working with Arduino development suites is absolutely bonkers.
It’s an old joke.
Ahahah! :)
@@AndreasSpiess that's a standard reply. 😁
Yet another great and in depth video. Thank you Andreas!
I am glad you liked it!
Boss: Where did you get your electronics degree?
Me: I got my electronics education from Adreas Spiess's TH-cam channel
Boss: Ok. You deserve a big rise ;-)
From Wiki and Google :)
What is missing is you didn't do a test that shows that you actually payed attention to the videos ;-)
+bitluni +eevblog +bigclive !!
Nikola Tesla: Andreas I am your father.......
Great video! Thank you for starting from first principles and including the business interest side of things. I started my career in semiconductors (pre-silicon verification, architecture, and design). I really enjoy the way you explained and simplified the overall market and motivations. I will gladly point to your videos in the future when friends ask to understand the concepts you presented.
Thank you! My intention was to create a comprehensive view. So I am glad you like it.
I have NEVER EVER EVER gotten so much value from a single TH-cam video EVER!
Words will never evolve to a place where it is enough to express how grateful and thankful I am to you for this video (,and neither will bytes lol. )
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for your kind words.
Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM could drive other licensees away, perhaps towards RISC-V. This is because ARM doesn’t allow licensees to make nonstandard changes to the architecture, while it appears Nvidia is looking to do just that. Being the owner of ARM, it will be the only vendor able to do that, which would give it an unfair competitive advantage. That will antagonize the other vendors, and encourage them to look for alternatives.
Sorry ... that is just NOT TRUE as written. ARM has different licenses, which support different types of usage of the ARM core designs. And if you look at what they have been doing in the last year alone, you will see that they have been lowering the entry barrier into making new designs... for eg they have this design start kit that lets a company take a cortex m core as bitstream (can burn it but not alter it) and then make their own custom extensions around it that they can either simulate of burn onto an fpga. This is how the RP2040 PIO was designed. You can buy the fpga board on digikey for 995$ and download the cortex m images for free today. But yes, in comparison an iCE40 board is 60$ and the risc-c core come in xhdl, python or scala code. But companies wanting to do things have always been able to do it... the statement that nvidia ‘will be the only vendor...’ is entirely without merit, but it does soud geat ... fud always does ;-)
DISCLAIMER: I am neither pro nor against anything... I just like to give people FACTS rather than my own opinions.That is why I like and respect Andreas’ work so much!
Yeah if I'm right you can add instructions and such if you buy a costlier license
@@Alperic27 Nvidia now owns ARM, as licenses expire they’re free to rewrite the rules. If you don’t like the new rules, fine, don’t use the chip. No other options? Meh, Nvidia won’t care. You’re analysis relies on the fact you believe Nvidia will play by the rules. It’s been proven they won’t.
@@c1ph3rpunk well Daren.... sorry, but nvidia DOES NOT own ARM... that IS A FACT... which I invite you to NOT BELIEVE ME ABOUT, and VERIFY YOURSELF. An acquisition of that magnitude is a BIG deal, and the FTC has an equally long and complex review process BEFORE the acquisition can be allowed. So, if you check, you will see that the process has entered phase 2, where nvidia and softbank are required to answer some questions about their intentions and other modalities. If you have checked, you also know that Qualcomm has raised an opposition in multiple jurisdictions against the sell, as well as ... Huawei .. and I think at least another chineese company. So.... ARM has not changed hands yet, and information is more than opinions ;-)
As I thought more about this, I think you may have the causality links all wrong: ARM does not prevent changes. ARM sells licenses that support making changes. They cost a lot of money because 1) ARM wanted to avoid fragmentation 2) this kind of license give access to IP that has cost millions and millions to develop over 30 years... BUT.. more importantly, there is the question of WHO/WHY want to make some changes to this IP?
The easiest way to understand that is to look at who makes changes today, or who is jumping early on RISK-V. WD as an eatly adopter: what they want is to have a consistent toolchain to build some highly specialized chips (controllers). So to them, and many others who are doing specialized chips, they dont want to have a complete arm8 or arm9 core, much less all the interconnect to have multiple cores on a single die.... for them the base risc-v core ISA (integer) is plenty... that and the decoding/execution pipeline that goes with it. for these people, a full ARM license is very costly for very little value as they most likely want to remove functionality rather than modify any of it. Of course there are the ones who may want to add some specialised ports to handle some tasks tasks in the hardware... but these people can do it today .. the rp2040 likely did not require a full license for the rpi foundation to design the PIO peripheral. So, to fridge vendors wanting you to be able to manage it from the internet, most ARM cores are overkill.. therefore I believe that the ‘but the license is expensive’ argument is bogus....
if you have ever worked with fpga/xHDL then you may have seen that copying IP from opencores for your own design is not always easy (maybe it is just that I deeply suck at it), so the ‘oh but look, the IP will be reusable accross designs’ seems to me also dubious. the ‘not invented here syndrome’ will likely lead to more ‘yeah momy look i shared my cpu design on github’ than it will to ‘let me reuse this intelligently designed IP core’. much of the opensource code on github is IMHO of bad to deplorable quality, so the same could happen with HW designs that will be filled with statically defined multipliers/divider constants that could make porting any parts a nightmare
Actually the title was a bit misleading, I thought I would not spare that much time to watch that content, and shelved it. Got a bit of time and get acquainted with very thoughtful and well researched review covering very many aspects of technology, business and history of electronic developments. Excellent video Andreas, a real gem.
Thank you.
Where do you think the title was misleading? I thought I covered the open source aspect in he video and how much open source the -C3 is.
@@AndreasSpiess I perceived the video would be mainly dedicated to the ESP32-C3 that does not have a robust toolchain at the moment thus not my piece of cake. The video was so much more than that. I would like to add one consideration to your CISC vs RISC discussion that was far from evident to me : CISC was not an oversight; at the time RAM was so expensive that it was much more economical to make the processor as sophisticated as possible to reduce the required code RAM footprint. (Just compare the number of FETs spent in a recent megaprocessor.com design on the decent 16 bits CPU and paltry 256 B memory.) The step change came along with the Gordon Moore's observation that was actually related to RAM chips. When there was enough fast RAM, design effort became focused on the CPU, and now the memory is lagging behind processors hence caches.
You are right with the expensive memory. And before RISC, nobody talked about CISC. We just had microprocessors. Only when RISC appeared they talked about CISC.
@@AndreasSpiess Yes, coining the term RISC undeniably helped promoting the concept of having more registers and exchange data with the memory using the dedicated instructions only. But it could be confusing to those who joined the party later.
Thanks Andreas, mind blown, I feel I can hold my own in a conversation with colleagues at work now 😀👍
Goal achieved!
Happy Birthday! Lots of health and a hundreds years of life! We wish you that your films have the greatest possible reach :) And of course thank you for your creativity! You really help us :)
Thank you!
hundreds* ;)
@@aronhighgrove4100 thx :)
He is hundred years old already
Quite a comprehensive and detailed overview. The future looks very interesting with this kind of development. Looking forward to see the next experiments.
We are all interested viewers in this show, I think...
Interesting and informative - have been in the IT industry (mostly Linux-related stuff) for longer than I want to admit, still learned several new things from this video. Your presentation of so much history/material is organized, coherent, and easy to follow. Well done!
Thank you for your nice words!
Great video. Btw, happy birthday Andreas!
Thank you!
What a great summary. I think this should be compulsory viewing for engineers at university as not only does give a great statement on RISK 5 but a history lesson as well. A Brilliant episode. Thank you. Simon
Thank you! This history is part of my life...
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I knew most of it but you did an excellent job telling the story. Well done.
Glad you liked it!
Wow, this is an awesome video. It’s packed full of insight, including some thoughtful ones concerning industry and company strategy. The video is only 25 minutes long, but I feel us viewers are benefitting from years of experience and knowledge. I just wonder how many hours (even years) you spent in the making of this video. Thank you for sharing. What a gift to the community. Truly Open Source!
Thank you for your very nice words! Indeed it took nearly my whole life to create this video.
For me the RISC-V based ESP32-C3 is interesting, because for RISC-V there's already an official LLVM backend present, which allows coding in alternate languages like Rust. That's not currently possible on Xtensa, and they seem to have little interest to complete one. (I know there's an official repository, but it moves really slowly).
Is this also the case for the periphery like WiFi ?
@@AndreasSpiess I'm not familiar with how the WiFi stack operates on the ESP32-C3, but afaik Espressif ported all the necesarry code of their custom FreeRTOS SDK for the RISC-V architecture, and that contains the usual API calls for the WiFi stack. Rust compiles to native through LLVM so as long there's binding for the API calls, it should be possible to access all things similarly. I don't think there's such ESP32-C3 specific Rust bindings at the moment, but it's only a matter of time, and a more skilled person could probably autogenerate that from the C headers. For the RTL8710 there's the freertos_rs crate for similar purposes: polyfractal.com/post/rustl8710/
Thank you so much for keeping us updated on the latest developments in the maker/microcontroller world!
You are welcome.
Just wanted to say thanks for doing what you're doing, Andreas. You're awesome.
You are welcome!
Dear Andreas 10:12 ... totally Correct! and there was not even the need to continue the video ... that would suffice to make a Great video :) :) ... A bit of numbers:
- Linux is 90% + of all major Web server.
- 90% of all Smartphones.
- 99% of all Large display Tv's ... yes inside they all have a ARM-Based Linux CPU.
- 99% of all Supercomputers.
- 90%+ of all Automotive Smart-drive and multimedia onboard cars.
- 95+ % of all Home Routers and multimedia stand-alone hardware.
... Linux RULES! :):)
Great video Andreas once again, but ... some parts of it would by themselves required Hundreds of hours of videos ... specially those regarding the architecture wars and OS-wars ... oh boy that was a big part of the last 4 decades on the Tech world! But you warned everyone the subjects mentioned were super-simplified ..so it's ok. Great video!
I agree with the hundreds of hours. This fact made it not easier to create this video ;-)
Your Linux Chart remembered me of the statistics of the first browsers... They were similar. And a few years later, Netscape was dead and Chrome king. I am curious what we will see in the future...
@@AndreasSpiess It is indeed the history of Technology "battles" of the last decades, a very complex subject over which many many books have been written and many more will come I'm sure.
About the future it is clear who won by the statistics I mentioned. It is by now Totally Irreversible.
Since early 90's I knew Linux would be the future and by then I had to install MS-DOS first in order to know hardware driver parameters, only after that I was able to install Linux.
But the issue remains, All Architectures are supported by Linux. Other then the Desktop with Strong Application dependency on MS platform all new contenders will search for something that is Open-Source, not because of Open-source itself but rather because that automatically creates a huge advantage on their ecosystem ... like in the case of the IBM and SUN DEC ... Platform makers know that they can either create their own little niche platform and end up like IBM/SUN or ..appeal to the entire developer community and offer Open Source Access to all in order to gain the most traction. Cost of entry is lower and giving everyone a Standard platform is a tremendous advantage for New system. No new contender on Any new Technology will ever come out again with proprietary stuff (I mean they will but it is doomed to failure) ... also Extending Linux Support for your hardware instantly gives your Hardware access to Everything All others developed for all other Platforms. It is a huge Leap forward from the get go.
Moreover the most likely scenario is that some years ahead Linux dominance on the areas mentioned will extend into the Desktop also. Anyone with simple knowledge of IT could today install Linux as a primary OS, run Virtualbox for example for one or two MS-only Applications.
I agree that obviously Chrome would kill Firefox simply because for each PC sold there are 3 smartphones sold ..all with Chrome installed ...
But even like that Firefox is ahead of All MS browsers all versions of edge and they come pre-instaled ...
In the case of OS choice and support there is no way out today of what Linux has achieved ...
Linus Torvalds once said that Linux Wins the Day Microsoft becomes a major Kernel Contributor ... Biggest corporate code contributor to Linux Kernel since about 4 years ... Microsoft!
Complete and total Surrender.
The fact remains Andreas, for every PC sold (almost all with Windows less then 10% with iOS) ... 5 Linux devices are sold ! (Mostly smartphones) ...
All of the Biggest companies on the world are fully behind Linux ... they range from HP, Oracle, IBM (acquired Red Hat), Intel, AMD, Samsung, Western Digital, even big Banks ..you name it.
NVIDIA acquired ARM (SoftBank had huge problems because of their Lunacy investing on the We Company they were "forced" to sell ARM to cope with the losses )... 80% of ARM revenue comes from Linux-Based sales. ARM sells hugely Because of Linux on Smartphones. NVIDIA will be forced to hugely increase their support to Linux ... at least on ARM ...
The momentum has turned hugely, and what I've foreseen in the early 90's is now coming into plain view.
I agree and it shows how important the "standardization on the lower level" is. I am not sure if only the open source aspect of Linux was important. I think it was also important that many big companies on the higher level contributed, as I mentioned in the video. BTW: I am still a heavy Windows user because it works. Linux, unfortunately does not work for me as soon as a leave the Raspberry world. And I think, I am not a complete idiot :-( It is still not made for the masses.
@@AndreasSpiess Yes I get what you are saying. My opinion is formed on the basis of the Consequences for big companies of the Open Source Model ... Let's imagine you get the finance to make a Brand New from the ground up Hardware Ecosystem ... Chips, Hardware ..the all lot. You get the backing of a Major Corporation, say IBM for example, they call you and say : Andreas your mission is simple: Destroy ARM ! :) :) we want all their sales ..no More NVIDIA nagging on us! You are going to spend a Lot of time developing your hardware from the ground up, like in the our present example on a RISC-V architecture.
Then comes the problem ... are you also going to Spend Even more time and resources Making Everything useful for that Hardware, that is Software, from the ground up? That is, all drivers for All other Hardware like network cards, video, sound, displays, peripherals all connectivity and telecom stack , from TCP/IP to everything else. All web protocols ... Everything Has to be built from Scratch ...
If you Adopt Linux you not only get Literally ALL available Hardware (ALL Hardware) as well as the Most Rock Solid implementations of Everything Else ... fromTCP/IP all the way to ftp/ssh/http/File Systems/image and sound and video formats and processing ... everything ... you would have instantly after building the hardware and adopting and adapting your hardware to the Linux Kernel you would get the Most Rock Solid and Extended Software Stack instantly running on your platform as well as the Even Bigger ... User Space Application Stack!
All of that Rock Solid, massively Certified and ... the magic word for any Corporation: Instantly And Free ... you would get the Software Ecosystem instantly for Free (very low cost at least many thing have to be adapted of course). Most importantly ..that Software ecosystem si evry time the number one Choice for Developers ... the most Important aspect of all.
- Or, Scenario 2: You turn to the Big Corp overlords and break then the "good news": Ok, we will make our Own Software Stack that No One Knows about, (No Developer will spend a second on that even if the Hardware was for free ...) And we will spend the next 10-15 years on Developers and another 10 Years developing a New OS (full of bugs .. ) ..oh and let's hope developers see some traction on the hardware sales to justify any user Space Application development ...
What do you think the Big Corporations would accept?
And to their question but but ... it's Open Source ... how can we "protect our IP" ... the answer is simple: Why protect something No ONE would want to buy 15 year from now? Loose 15 years of Huge Work and in the end after seeing all platforms Standardizing surrender it all?
It's a hands down choice at this moment.
About your Linux in the desktop experience. I know it is more complex and requires more time than windoze. But I use Linux since 1997 and as a Full Time Primary Desktop since 2002 on a 64Bit AMD ..Windows did not even had half-decent 64 bit support until 2006 .... and it is all a matter of spending some time learning the tricks on the OS. I also Save a lot time because i do not know what a anti-virus program is ... my hardware last much much longer and if you get VirtualBox you have the Best of Both worlds although every time more I get less and less need to go to VirtualBox and run Windows inside it.
Also I consider the Raspberry Pi several OS's very very lame when compared to Real Distros Like OpenSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like ... of course the Desktop of choice on RPi can not be a KDE or Gnome ...
I think we do not need to agree. Future will tell. In this video I tried to focus on history and tried to explain what happened and my interpretation about it. Maybe I am wrong in some places. One thing is sure: I am not good in predicting. As Einstein (or somebody else) said: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Hope RISC-V gets widely adopted. Great video!
Agreed!
I will ask a stupid question.... what do you think it will allow that cannot be done today? .... .. .... dont get me wrong.. I love to read assembly language.. and understanding how to build my own add-2-then-substract-5 machine instruction was a very ... pointless but exiting experience.... but most people here will only ever program their boards in C or python... so they will NEVER see if they run on a risk-v, mips or arm core.... simple fact. but i love the name risc-v, it sounds much cooler (forget that it just means it was their 5th time defining a new ISA for teaching)
you want to truly FEEL empowered today? Learn to program the RP2040 PIO... and do it in C, not in python ;-)
@@Alperic27 Understandable. But in the grand scheme of things, widespread adoption will hopefully see more custom Soc being made. For example, there are already many companies working on RISC-V cores for AI workloads. And most of these companies will end writing APIs for them. As an end result, I would hope, that I don't need to buy a Jetson Nano, but rather something much cheaper even if it has 1/10 the performance. Right now there are not much others which can do that.
Like your said, most users will still be using C, and that's good IMO, especially for beginners.
@@alkmst-xyz I apologize if my remark may sound ‘antagonistic’, let me assure you it is not my intention... I honnestly think that most people do not understand what risc-v is or means for the future
Again I ask: for what tangible benefit? ‘Core’ is a misleading word that covers multiple realities. For eg, the jetson nano soc contains 4 a57 ARM cores, which make it a full blown general purpose cpu. That part has nothing to do at all with the ML part which is made of 128 maxwell cores (these are completely different core from the base risc-v integer core for eg). The maxwell core are not covered in the risc-c modular core IP, and the fact that many companies are building new AI cores will not change that. Burning them into a discrete asic or as part of an soc does not change what they are or how they work... risc-v, mips or anything else has zero influence here. Neither does having an API has anything to do with what an ISA is or does.
Another eg: today coral is a dedicated asic that can be programmed with a library or used transparently in a tensorflow model. The only reason why people have not made more asics is that 1) the knowledge is scarce, 2) the manufacturing is expensive... not that people cannot do it, or need to risc-v ISA to be able to finally do it... truly unrelated!! Google chose to package coral either as a complete board with a NXP quad a53 core soc or as a simple usb dongle. Adafruit is also prototyping a spi (think i made a mistake here.. could be I2C) board with the coral asic.
Now the intersection with risc-v will at best be that 1) someone will make an ISA extension for ML to expose some low level tensor operators to abstract what the coral asic or the maxwell cores do (via the nvidia libs), or 2) the next generation of coral-like asic may be replaced with SOCs like nvidia did with jetson... but that may actually mean LESS FREEDOM... as the main cpu will be chosen by the soc vendor.... I much prefer to have more coral like solutions where I can even attach it to my Raspberry PI if I want, instead of being limited to use whatever the soc will contain. But yes... there will be another benefit that you have not mentioned: IF people share some ML ISA extensions, then you and I will be able to burn them ourselves onto an ECP5 class fpga alongside a pico-32 or rocket core, and .... and what? .... we will have to wait for someone to also opensource the tensorflow library that will use these new instruction, and more importantly wait for them to be supported in the GCC backend......... .... but it will be fun, when it happens... in a couple years? Until then, tinyml can do a lot of things on a simple arm core.
@Alperic27 First off, don't worry, I feel like we are having a healthy discussion:)
I understand the confusion regarding my use of "core". What I meant is that, in general, more people (who have the knowledge to design custom cores) can create application-driven SOCs; But of course if not for the mass market, it would not make a ton of sense to do that. Companies like Esperanto are working on this kind of stuff (they created a RISC-V based SoC with 1000+ cores targeted towards ML workload for server-side application).
I agree that the coral is a good platform, and deserves more recognition (I am planning on getting one of those Coral Modules/ dev board for some vision-based projects). Right now, TensorFlow (Lite) Micro is still a work in progress; last I checked they are still porting most of the operations from TensorFlow Lite. Hopefully, we get a standalone TensorFlow package for Microcontrollers.
TBH it seems that you know much more about these things than me; I am more of an applications person who doesn't have to care what ISA it is using. Nevertheless, it is exciting to see some competition for ARM.
Just want to tell you that I quite appreciate your detailed reviews of these new devices. They simplify the job of selecting appropriate processors and sensors.
Thank you!
Another great video, thank you. Happy birthday from South Africa
Thank you!
Very good analysis of what is going on behind the curtains, makers are always so deep involved in their projects that they so not know what is coming from where. It is very difficult to find all these information in one place like your video and surely this will help makers to make decisions if/when they want to go for business. thanks for the deliting "nerd" videos I watch every sunday morning.!
This story is part of my life...
12:44 I always thought ARM was build out from Acorn ( producers of the BBC Micro and Acorn Archimedes) and that Apple got interested in RISC much later.
You are right. I had to leave that out (as many other things)
The original ARM architecture was created by Acorn as the "Acorn RISC Machine"; they did a couple versions on their own and then spun out the processor design team as a joint venture with Apple and VLSI Technology as Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. in 1990. So, Acorn, Apple, and VLSI all owned some share of the original ARM spin-out business. Apple was interested in using the architecture as the CPU in the Newton. In 1998, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ with a name change as ARM Ltd. They remained an independent company until purchased by SoftBank in 2016, and in Sept 2020 Nvidia announced plans to purchase them from SoftBank, though that's not yet finalized.
There was also a period of Acorn ownership by Olivetti - best known as a dot matrix printer manufacturer I think. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember ARM IP was not included in the Olivetti deal though.
@@iwbnwif Olivetti was originally a typewriter maker, but they got involved with computers early on and made one of the first transistorized mainframes.
Adriano Olivetti, the son of the founder of the Olivetti company, created the semiconductor foundry SGS to make reliable diodes and transistors for Olivetti's mainframes. SGS later merged with Thompson Semiconductors to form the company we now know as STMicroelectronics!
Hello again from Tokyo Andreas! I felt the same way so we became RISC-V members.
Cool!
I love your channel... I have learned much from you already.. thanks brother.
You are welcome!
Brings me back. I worked on Unix compilers from 88 to 95. I worked on every RISC chip mentioned, plus Intel and Motorola CISC. You covered it very well.
Thank you!
in all honesty, This is one of the best descriptions in the amount of time you spent from the A to Z you covered!!! great distillation.
Thank you for your kind words!
The best analogies I ever heard! Great job! Love your work :)
Thank you!
Grüzi Andreas ! I'm watching your videos in an intermittent kind for some time now and must admit that it always had been fun to listen to your staements. I learnt a lot. But this video is prepared excellently - even 2 years after it was released ! Great job ! Keep on doing like this !
Thank you! The content of this video probably will age well because it is logical and not technological ;-)
Very nice quote:
Standardization on lower level, flexibility on higher level.
Hats off sir
This is very important. I suggest you never forget it!
@@AndreasSpiess 🙏
I'm from India and huge fan of your work sir.
🙏
I loved that chart (3:36) of all the Arm ISA levels, that's going in the collection. Thanks!
Wow this was great video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I think it's worth noting that pretty much no semiconductor manufacturer uses a single ISA across their whole product line. The Maker community tends to have a somewhat narrow view of the world of CPUs and MCUs based on what's in PCs, powerful consumer gadgets like phones, and things that have been associated with some Open Source projects before. This is for pretty good reasons; you tend to have to pay a lot of money for development tools outside this little slice of the processor world, and they're marketed to specific kinds of companies. But they make up really significant parts of the whole semiconductor ecosystem, so you have to be careful about assuming the importance of one ISA family like ARM even if it's completely dominating the Maker-visible parts of the semiconductor world right now.
RISC-V definitely has the potential to eat into the share of the market that ARM currently dominates, but as you noted, the ISA itself is only a very tiny part of the picture. ARM provides not just an ISA, but several reference design implementations of it, a number of bus architecture designs to connect various kinds of peripherals, a line of GPU designs, etc. This stuff is very mature and very well supported with 3rd party hardware IP and software. It's going to continue to dominate in parts that are meant for end-user programming for a while!
RISC-V is going to first take over where companies need CPU cores to run the internals of some in-house hardware design. You can see this from the interest shown by Seagate, Western Digital, Nvidia, etc. It's going to run inside the *peripherals* of computers first, where users mostly won't even be aware that there's a CPU involved at all. I think it might also stand a chance of being relevant to "hyperscaler" data center hardware, where PC-born bus architecture standards are in place already and there's a ton of cash to burn on long-term projects that'll result in cutting out ARM license costs in the long run, and the software stacks are internally-maintained by armies of programmers. I can also see Apple looking at RISC-V for future gadgets; cutting ARM license fees out of products where possible seems like a very Apple thing to do.
Espressif choosing RISC-V for its ESP8266-replacement follows along these same lines; if you remember when the ESP8266 first hit the Maker scene, it wasn't really meant to be user-programmable; it was just a super-cheap WiFi chip you could hook up to an Ardunio via serial and control via AT commands. A lot of radio chips are designed like this; they take care of some layers of the radio protocol on their own, and you communicate with them over some serial bus from a more powerful MCU. Their choice of a weird Tensilica CPU architecture doesn't really hurt anything if they're the only ones coding for it, and switching to RISC-V makes it even more accessible now that Makers have exposed the usefulness of the chips when loaded with custom firmware.
Don't think for a minute that STMicroelectronics is wedded to ARM, or that they won't embrace RISC-V if they see a benefit to it. They embraced some odd architectures in the past, and they still have a sizable line of 8-bit STM-8 and automotive Power MCUs. There may not end up being a reason, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
I agree with your statements. And I am far from saying that ARM is dead. I am too old and saw many such wars. I tried to give an update from today's point of view and hope, I di not do too much prediction for the future.
Very, VERY well done ! A top illustration of "Gesunder Menschenverstand" and how simple the world can become when you have learned how to use common sence.
Thank you! I would add a part "abstraction" to the common sense ;-)
Thanks for the in-depth video! I think that some maker companies like sipeed and seeed are doing a great job in pushing riscv for the maker market
We will see if they will deliver a Arduino compatible environment. Otherwise it will be hard for them in the Maker Market, I think.
@@AndreasSpiess most of them are pushing for micropython
I made a video about MicroPython 2 years ago. There you see my position. But you can also reads the comments. You do not find another MicroPython video on this channel since :-( But with the appearance of Pi Pico it might change...
One of the best and most practical summaries/overviews I've seen. Good job!
Thank you!
Happy birthday from Ireland (where we drive on the correct side of the road ;-)).
You are also on the correct side of the EU border :)
@@AndreasDelleske :-)
@BaronVonBiffo Thank you!
The guy with the Swiss accent has a particularly sarcastic & interesting dry humour!
Thank you for your Clear Concise lesson.
You are welcome!
Never enough open source software let alone hardware. COOL.
:-)
Andreas, this video was more fun than 3 movies back to back! Congrats 🎉
:-) Thank you!
An important issue for RISC-V is the fact, that chinese companies have to get independant from American-owned IP. And this is an issue for European companies and countries as well, as it might become a topic in trade wars and a subject of manipulation of NSA and friends. Thus it is quite a good idea to become somewhat independant from American-owned IP at least in critical infrastructures.
Well, they can develop their own IP based on RiscV ISA without paying anyone.
Global politics also can have an influence, I agree.
what a precise :) and clear explanation, not fluff straight to the point, echte Schweizer
Thank you!
That was amazing coverage! You're always awesome Mr. Spiess! I have lots to consider now. My stomach turned when I heard Nvidia bought ARM. I didn't see how that was good for anyone except Nvidia, if it's even good for them in the long-run to survive the blowback. Many IT I know are buying up AMD because they perceive Nvidia to start bullying more, and they wish to stay flexible.
The deals seems not done yet. We will see what happens...
Loved your infotertenmaint.... Also loved your way of simplifying it
Glad you liked it
As a teen, many years ago, I along with two other friends were avid photography fans. We each bought SLR cameras ... but different brands. I had a Pentax, one friend had a Nikon, and the other a Canon. We often spent hours upon hours, as young people do, debating the merits of one system vs the other. But in truth, functionally these cameras were virtually identical. Except of course, they were completely incompatible with each other. Nikon lenses, filters etc. fit only Nikon cameras etc. There were other camera companies as well, which were similarly incompatible. They all deliberately avoided any standard ... presumably to force customers to buy only their products.
Then Tamron came along, introducing the t-mount and a whole series of 'really great' lenses, which could be universally fit on any of these cameras, simply by switching inexpensive t-mounts. Tamron came into existence and thrived, by exploiting the lack of standardization in the camera industry.
... and so it continues.
A very good example how non-standard things can destroy value. You three probably only needed one particular good lens. Like that, non of you had one. But you had three very similar sets for the same price...
Uhmm sweet sweet vendor lock-in.
@@AndreasSpiess The problem with lenses and optics is that most coupling rings do not permit focus out to infinity. The Tamron improvement was making the lense infinity available using their flexible lenses. Exit barrier is the lock-in mechanism.
@@AndreasSpiess I just re-watched your video and have a few more comments.
You made the point that RISC-V is a competitor to ARM. I think there's another reason RISC-V will soon take off. The USA seems determined to deny China access to technology, presumably to protect American IP and security concerns. It's not a simple question of royalties, China may not have access to ARM at all. This is forcing them to seek alternatives, and RISC-V is an obvious solution. By denying access, the USA may inadvertently unleash a flood of cheap alternatives to the market, which could come back and bite them. Forcing your opponents to innovate, may have unintended consequences. For the rest of us however, this may be the beginning of a huge opportunity.
For the past 2 weeks I've been tinkering with some ESP32-C3 modules which I recently bought on AliExpress for around CAD$3 each. My goal was to set up an environment for RISC-V assembler programming, including hardware debugging. I've done this on Eclipse and can tell you that it works great, especially since the ESP32-C3 chip includes an onboard hardware JTAG debugger (super easy to use.) And ... as you suggest, there is also a LOT of additional functionality on these chips besides just the open source RISC-V ISA. Setting up the environment is not for beginners, but others have done it, and there is a fair amount of information available for those wanting to try.
For beginners, these are still very powerful and super affordable boards, which are fully supported on Arduino etc.
My point is, 'now' might be a real good time to start embracing RISC-V.
I graduated math/computer science at UCLA in 1981. At that time there actually *were* multiple architectures and diverse ecosystems. The curriculum *never* discussed economics or how engineers fit into ecosystems. This huge blind-spot helped monopolies like ibm/intel/microsoft crush creativity. Thank you for your always excellent content.
You are welcome! BTW: I added a Business Administration PhD to my EE training precisely because of what you describe. And I never regretted ;-)
I definitely desire to develope and encourage others to create exclusive alt competing wireless Internet and peer to peer mesh networks.
Great presentation, I learned a bunch of stuff that I hadn't before, despite my obsession with tech videos. Anyway, I understand your disappointment about the amount of open source on the silicon, but the piece that IS open source, I think, is exciting enough to still make it pretty exciting. That common standard you talked about will provide a free means to compatibility for a vast number of companies, and hopefully, software! I'm happy to wait for more open source silicon, because of the possibilities we will have now! unless I misunderstand something, which could easily happen here!
I am sure it has its potential. But a long way to go...
A very concise and interesting analysis. Thank you. I suspect greed will continue to distort the utopian solution?
Unfortunately it is not easy to distinguish between "good business" and "greed". At least not for me...
@@AndreasSpiess not sure how to translate correctly to English... but once I hear great way to distinguish:
great businessman is always immoral beast. If you see businessman who is good man, probably he is bad businessman...
Andreas, this 'diluted' video was absolutely fantastic. Easily digestible. Thank you sharing this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for the great lecture. I feel like I just got an introductory lesson for a computer engineering degree for free. Very interesting and informative. And apparently it is your birthday. Congratulations!
Glad to see you back! Thank you for your wishes.
Andreas, I think you are spot on. I do think that you missed the part of history where people discovered that you could do general purpose computing on small microprocessors. Many of the hobby computer people used Motorola chips at that point (and some Texas Instruments). The primary ecosystem was CP/M. The combination of IBM getting into the business of personal computing and Apple's meteoric growth created a business vector that essentially killed all the CP/M companies. Indirectly you said "Business forces standardization, Engineers abhor it." I started my computer career in the early '70s and can only say that it is the natural ying/yang of people who create vs people who control. Thanks for the terrific video on RISC-V. Very well done.
You are right, I could have started earlier. But the early developments were not too important for my story about RiscV. As said, I had to destill a lot!
Never watched such a dry thematic with so much joy. Great explanation, nice voice, good presentation. Keep up the good work.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I really appreciate the amount of research and presentation value in this video. Your knowledge and facility to convey complex topics is sublime.
Thank you!
This was incredibly informative! Thank you for all the details and relivent background.
Glad you enjoyed it!
No one else would have explained it better , thanks 🙏 a ton
Very nice. Thank you!
You save me a lot of time Andreas. I was planning on investing much time in purchasing a RISC-5 board and understanding it as best I could. I will spend my time else ware. I learned so much.
Glad I saved your time! BTW: Nice name you have ;-)
I really love this video. Has explained in a systematic manner with basics.
Edit: Can't imagine the amount of research needed for presenting this complex of a topic so appetizing.
Glad you like it! It took my whole business life to get all the info ;-)
I just discovered your channel and I cannot stop watching your videos! Excellent!
Welcome aboard the channel!
@@AndreasSpiess thank you so much! I have not worked with microcontrollers since a lot of time and yesterday with you videos I discovered the ESP32 familiy OMG! 😍 it is beautiful!
Excellent! I really appreciate the historical background (even if very subjective and abbreviated) and the effort you put into explaining the economic context.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Excellent video to recall history of chips technology, very good job, well done! Thanks a lot Andrea.
Glad you liked it!
Excellent video. I think we will see more open source chip designs, e.g. coming from not-for-profit organisations like LowRISC where all the RTL is open source. You can also get chips manufactured for the order of €10k or so through Europractice, which is doable for University research projects that might want to add new experimental features to an open source RISC-V core, which is not something you can do with an ARM core. A couple of minor corrections: you usually hand off GDSII to a chip foundry, not RTL; Windows NT was supported on DEC Alpha.
I agree. As said in the intro: I will shamelessly simplify. Unfortunatly, NT did not help the Alpha too much :-( This says an ex DECie..
Andreas; Great presentation. I had no idea how complex this silicon world is.
And this was only the tip of the iceberg ;-)
Many many happy returns of the day Andreas... Keep inspiring us with many more such videos...
I will!
The first portion of this would make for a wonderful Economics Course discussion. Nice Video
You are right. It seems that professors use it for such courses :-)
Excellent review of the state of the question. You show the big picture in this video.
Congrats and thanks Mr. Swiss Guy!
Many thanks!
truly fascinating video, I came looking for a single piece of information and left with a fresh new perspective on the world -- very nice
Glad you enjoyed it! Yes, I tried to use this example to explain a few generally useful concepts.
Thanks for bringing this to a broader audience and clear explanation. RISC-V hopefully will bring more flexibility to all of us.
There is hope 👍
Agreed!
Thank you for the video and the pointer for the ESP32-C3 device. What's interesting is that Expressif includes a RISC-V core in the ESP32-S2 as an alternative for the "ULP" - ultra low power processor. It only has access to a limited bit of memory, but at least a developer can use a real compiler and to write programs for it, rather than hand-assembling "instructions" for the simple state-machine low-power co-processor in the original ESP32. I wonder if that was a "test run" for Expressif in integrating the RISC-V IP into their designs and fab processes?
I do not know their plans. I would be glad if somebody shows us to us c to program the ULP...
Andreas: Excellent. Answered all my most pressing questions. Well done as usual.
Thank you!
Happy birthday Doctor Spiess, here from Brazil, Afranio(father) and Caio(son)!! Thank you for teaching us so much content! Health and Peace! God bless you!
Thank you very much! Greetings to Brasil, too!
Thanks a lot, Maestro! One of the advantages of living in the south of the world, is that I can wake-up early on Sundays and have my coffee ☕️ following this fantastic channel. Today was a must! Greetings 🖖 from 🇨🇱 (by a Brazilian 🇧🇷 ;-)
Glad I am part of your Sunday morning procedure!
Excellent video. It could be a graduation class!! Congratulation on the organization of the content and brilliant clear definition and explanation of such important concepts!!
Glad you liked it!
I am 8:22 into this video and just because your explanations are so entertaining and simple, I hit the subscribe button. Well done, very well done. I am looking forward to see the rest of the video, now :-D
Welcome aboard the channel!
Good video and full of truth.
I liked best how you concisely said that every company wants to commoditize the layer below them. And also if you follow the money you will understand the motivations. I couldn't agree more!
These two points probably are more important than the rest!
Very interesting video, going to be interesting to see how this market changes over the next few years.
To stay in business these days you have to deliver value (Yes, more than just offer), which means providing the customers with the product and service which works for them.
That's a mouthful right there.
Thanks for the awesome show which I look forward to on Sunday afternoons.
Best regards,
South Africa
I agree with the fact that you have to deliver value to your customers!
As always useful AND interesting, Andreas! Thanks a bunch for this comprehensive overview!
Glad it was helpful!
Very well made video. Well done!
Thank you very much!
Great video as always 👍
Thanks for sharing your knowledge to all of us 👍😊
Thank you! Glad you liked it.
I think you missed a particularly interesting RV chip- the K210. Dual core 600MHz 64 bit with FPU, 8MB of RAM, and numerous accelerators for audio recognition, AI, and so forth. Very inexpensive and available in several different SBCs from Sipeed for around $20-30 that include a color LCD, micro SD, VGA camera, onboard microphone and stereo audio amplifier. It has 64 I/O ports as well, though many are dedicated. It ships natively with microPython and is very powerful, not sure how successful they were after their Kickstarter that I tried, but I had a very positive experience.
Unfortunately, I do not see a lot of projects using the K210 even it is an impressive chip. Libraries and projects are very important for the acceptance of hardware in the Maker community.
even with the disclaimer at the start i found this explainer good and helpful -- thank you.
You're welcome!
I knew a lot of this stuff, having lived through it the first time, but I really like how well you put the pieces together. I am very interested in the implications of new technologies and your perspective is very helpful.
This video tells also parts of my life ;-)
A difficult subject to cover. Very well explained. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I learned a lot today! and understand the reason of many things that I did not understand before
This was my goal. Glad it worked.
Extremely wonderfully explained
Just the correct level of simplification!
Thank you!
This was far more interesting and useful than I could expect. Thank you so much!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I’m a little behind on your content, but I get to it eventually. Thanks for making such great content Andreas. I really appreciate your detailed analysis and it was interesting and useful!
Thank you for your kind feedback!
In a led driver that I've bought recently there was a chip BL602 from Bouffalo labs. It's also a Risc V chip and probably suits well for large volumes. So, maybe is the new path for some embedded devices. Two months ago I wanted to investigate. But on the other hand also Expressif is about to launch the ESP32-S3 that seems impressive (at least on paper) and also comes with a Risc V low power processor. I think I'll wait for it.
I assume Espressif also knows the BL602 and do not want to loose the market ;-)
10:00 Hi, there is a little error, Windows on ARM is available since Windows 8 RT. Before RT there was Windows CE, i know, not a "real" Windows, which also worked on PowerPC, MIPS, ARM and x86. So there was or is still a support from Microsoft, not the best, but it is there :)
Thank you for the additional info!
Excellent summary, sensei. This should be in curriculum material of CS 1st year.
Thank you. I would be glad this video is widely used. It took some effort to crate it...
It's nice the ISA is open at least. Have to start somewhere. I look forward to seeing you experiment with it! I always learn something watching your videos. Thanks!
We will see. I need much more to start with it. For example an integration into Arduino...
Perfect timing. You managed to release the video in exactly 2 week.
??
@@AndreasSpiess In the last video, you told me that the video on esp32-c3 was coming in 2 weeks.
This prediction was not difficult because it was already finished...
Communicating technology is certainly a forte of yours Andreas; I did not expect to learn as much as I did... *(Happy Birthday!)
Thank you! Underpromise and overdeliver was always a good strategy;-)
I appreciated the high level Arm/risc comparisons and their overall impact. Thanks.
You are welcome!
Excellent presentation and very informative. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
aaaah!
I thought you were speaking about the ESP32-S3 in the last video, not the C3 Version :D
Ok, I'm gonna watch this! But the mentioning of FPGA already excites me!
edit: very cool video, thanks for that overview! I'm sure, i'll also stick to the Sx Line of the ESP32 series.
But I'd love to see some more of FPGA stuff in the maker scene :D
1. I do not have any S3 chips (so far)
2. Unfortunately I did not find a lot of cool Maker projects for FPGA where you do not need a Ph.D. to understand them :-(
@@AndreasSpiess I hope you get one of them soon :) 👍 in the end you are the most known swiss maker!
Hmm I know one cool project!
FPGA based Ethereum miner! I think there are even HDL sources for that available 🤔
And if not.. oh well, it's never too late for PhD XD
I already have one (in Business Administration) This is probably why I so far did not care too much about the blockchains :-(
I think this is one of your best videos yet
Thank you!
Understanding all that is one thing - presenting it so others can get a grasp of what you are talking about is another thing . Thanks for the distilled alcohol !
You are welcome! We will see if I did an ok job. I expect a lot of discussions...
NXP has low power radio equipped SoC powered by Risc-V but making not much public declarations (to avoid conflicts with ARM perhaps?)
I did not know this fact. Thank you.