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Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

The Freedom E310 chip in the HiFive1 board is shipping today and is already competitive with embedded ARM: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1/#comparisons. It's comically faster (i.e., 100x) than the AVR chip in the Arduino Uno board, but the similar form factor makes it cheap & easy for early adopters to play around with.

I'd bet that within five years a good proportion, even the majority, of Amazon & Google servers, will be running on RISC V chips.

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I'd bet that within five years a good proportion, even the majority, of Amazon & Google servers, will be running on RISC V chips.

Can I take the other side of that bet?

I'm mildly bullish on RISC V, but displacing x86/AMD64 in the data center in 2 generations (servers generally have a 2 year refresh cycle) seems fairly optimistic.

ARM hasn't managed it, despite some good attempts. Nor has AMD, nor Power8/9.

> It's comically faster (i.e., 100x) than the AVR chip in the Arduino Uno board

Beating AVR cores on performance is like stealing candy from a baby. No one hands out prizes for that.

It is not competitive at all yet. In the world of embedded system, the processing power is not all about embedded system. The CPU takes less than 10% of the sillicon of the chip. Look at what what it got - A single SPI, some PWMs, even so I2C, no hardware timer, no ADC/DAC. So it should rely on software implementation of peripheral. Lack of hardware peripherals will lead to fail real time requirements. It may slower than even arduino in some operations. Moreover, where are you going to use 320MHz with tiny 16kb of RAM? This chip might be useful for calculating such as DSP or Machine learning unit but this is yet practically useless for a microcontroller. There is yet a long way to take off.

The big problem with the E310 is that after you've prototyped something and want to design a custom board, you've got a much more difficult task ahead of you. The AVR needs a significantly fewer number of support chips, as it has onboard flash, has pretty large voltage tolerances, has adcs, etc. It gets even murkier when you start considering boards from other companies like STMicro, which have Cortex-M7s, are competitive in performance and have boards that go for half the cost of a hifive1. It's interesting if you want to poke around with Risc-V for the purpose of poking around, but i wouldn't want to start a serious project based on it at the current time.

That sheet doesn't mean anything, they are comparing a microcontroller clocked at a frequency of 300 MHz with microcontrollers clocked at 30 MHz.

Of course that they have better performance... Misleading marketing material.

Is there a power consumption comparison?

(I know there is DMIPS/mW, but looking for a direct power consumption comparison)

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