Where is Arm's moat? Is it on the software or the hardware ecosystem side?
Hardware, I guess? ARM's moat is that you can buy a fairly RISC CPU today for a fairly cheap price. It won't stay that way forever though, and there are efforts underway with RISC-V to drain that moat.
The interesting part (to me) is speculating which parts of the market ARM will choose to focus on. Microcontrollers seem like a lost cause at their price point, but making a shift to higher-margin licensing might be part of a strategy to acknowledge that loss.
> Microcontrollers seem like a lost cause at their price point
Is there even a RISC-V that can compete against the ARM Cortex-M33? Or ARM Cortex-M0+ ?
ARM has the microcontroller market in a deathgrip. I'm honestly not seeing any competition here from anybody. STM32, NXP, Microchip SAM, etc. etc. Its all ARM.
You get some 8-bitters (8051 lol still alive) at the lowest end with SiLabs USB stuff and other such stuff. But ARM is incredibly dominant here.
> ARM has the microcontroller market in a deathgrip.
No they don't actually. RISC-V is already selling billions of devices and its growing at an absurd rate.
You have companies like WesternDigital transforming all their products to RISC-V. And a lot of harddrive and SSD vendors are following. You have companies like Andes that push RISC-V onto every cheap consumer device from China. Companies like SiFive are pushing into the automotive market. NXP has RISC-V products already. Companies like Gaisler into the space market.
RISC-V is in more places then people realize and its still very early in the adoption curve. There are like 100s RISC-V companies pushing RISC-V into every niche.
> RISC-V that can compete against the ARM Cortex-M33? Or ARM Cortex-M0+
In terms of performance, RISC-V offerings are already beating them. ARM has momentum but in terms of performance per area RISC-V is better.
> NXP has RISC-V products already
Can you please give me a link to Digikey (or Mouser) with the part number that I can use to verify this claim?
Here's what shows up in my search: just PowerPC and ARM chips from NXP: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/embedded/microcon...
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Note that Cortex-M33 parts are extremely competitive. See my discussion points here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35296747
I seems I might have been mistaken about NXP, they are part of RISC-V foundation and have worked on some parts where the core was an OpenSource RISC-V core. But I couldn't find an actual product.
As for the Cortex-M33, I don't know if RISC-V cores in your link. So not sure we have a great bases for comparison.
If if it is better now, there are so many more companies competing on core design, I don't think ARM can consistently outperform all of them in all segments. RISC-V is just a superior business model and it will eventually just win.
I mean, 8051 isn't dead yet. SiLabs continues to make extremely competitive UniversalBee 8051 designs.
In my experience, bet on legacy. There will always be enough time to wait and switch later if things turn out better.
This is doubly so in embedded, where legacy issues / manufacturing issues reign king over performance.
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Cores are often the wrong thing to focus on anyway at the embedded level. I don't think performance is a major concern. Maybe power/performance is a concern in battery constrained apps, but many electronics will bottleneck elsewhere.
So I'm really not sure how or why RISC-V would break into the uC world / low end.
If anywhere, they have a chance at the higher level, like at Rasp Pi level chips or stronger.
Performance isn't that important maybe (depends on the application), but energy often is, size is, having lots of vendors is, having a large software base is.
> So I'm really not sure how or why RISC-V would break into the uC world / low end.
If by lower end you mean 8-bit, then no it wont. But one of the large adopters of RISC-V are actually places where there used to be tiny 8-bit cores and now people want more substantial 32-bit cores and RISC-V is really good there.
And it has already broken into that market as there are already lots of RISC-V products shipping, lots of them in lots of consumer electronics from China.
RISC-V will continue to grow in that market, if you were a MIPS costumer for example, you are likely gone move on to RISC-V?
> If anywhere, they have a chance at the higher level, like at Rasp Pi level chips or stronger.
At the very low end being very cheap, not involving as many lawyers actually matters quite a bit because volumes are high. Specially when there are very competitive verified opensource cores as well.
Ibex: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex
Used by Google in the OpenTitan Project
Open Hardware Group:
Chips Alliance:
Not to mention all the commercial offerings (or commercial offerings that support those open-cores). They might not be open, but its easy to get up and running with RISC-V compared to commercial stuff.
There is just so much education moving to RISC-V. Lots of people will be educated in RISC-V and lots of people will look at some of these OpenSource cores to learn. When places like Berkley, Stanford and ETH embrace something it usually trickles down to most universities.