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Comment by abelsson | Hacker News Reader

There's gazillions of embedded processor cores in every device you own. Your SSD, network card, phone, motherboard, router, TV, modem, car, fridge, you name it all have multiple processor cores running some piece of firmware you never see. RISC-V has a pretty good value proposition for those: an open standard with no licensing costs with a rapidly maturing software ecosystem. To say that RISC-V will only succeed if you can attach a monitor to it only betrays a very narrow view of where processors are actually used.

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... most of whom are already using ARM.

Intel - Intel - tried to compete in the embedded market and has recently quietly withdrawn several of its products. It's a tougher market than it sounds, and it's also more conservative than you'd expect.

Is that because it's that hard or they bet against ARM with its style of ecosystem?

I think a combination of things, really. They never scaled down properly to really low end devices. The Intel systems had poor peripherals for some reason with high latency. They didn't really grasp the detail of what was needed for either the "maker" or industrial markets. And of course it wasn't a licensable IP.

Great summary. I could see that doing them in.

True, many are indeed using ARM (in house designs are also more popular than you might think in deeply embedded SoCs), but a lot of companies would love to be able to throw out ARM due to licensing cost & hassle, or at least have a viable option in RISC-V to throw at ARM at the bargaining table.

Intel is expensive, and not very power efficient in tiny chips. ARM is much cheaper and more efficient. RISC-V is similar to ARM, but even more cheaper.

nVidia are actively investing in RISC-V, which gives them a fairly good entry point into this market. Its a decent start.

Intel didn't really try. You know who did really try ? espressif, with their famous ESP32.

Or the startups: indie-semi, who sell mcu's built as lego's from multiple dies, affordably! which allows them to do custom-design and semi-custom design of mcu's per customer , while offering a large library of standard mcu's.

Or terechip, who built a chip packaging process who can handle dies orders of magnitude smaller than current systems - opening possibilities for far cheaper mcu's and other simple chips.

Or even ambiq-micro, which created a way to design mcu's that take ~10x(?) less power by enabling transistors to work on an extremely low supply voltage.

This is how you compete with entrenched competitors. By doing something they cannot do.

And Intel ? their fab doesn't even fit mcu's(no flash on logic processes, not good fit for analog). They had no advantage, no differentiation( maybe besides their neural network, a feature that didn't seem to attract customers). How did they expect to win ?

I'd say the ESP8266 is famous. ESP32 is still pretty new

Its almost as if they expect that just putting chips into a market makes that market have to buy it, almost as if they have gotten to used to not needing to compete. How could a chip vendor that has thoroughly cornered a few major market segments and might be considered to have some amount of monopoly status ever get into such situation?

That metric of success will never be achieved if you don't win the heart and minds of "regular folks" and remember, to "make" a phone, router, TV or fridge you first need to plug your keyboard somewhere.

Don't try to conquer ARM doing what ARM has done, time doesn't go back and the small world of embed big wigs will ignore you.

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