Well, that is definitely true. I guess that the quibble is with the assumption of equivalence….
(which you didn’t explicitly state, so I apologize for thinking it that way)
….of the launching of arch64 with the launching of the RiscV ISA.
They were both theoretically clean slate designs, but one was made by a bunch of academics and the other by a company with decades of ISA design expertise. I’d expect the latter to be much, much more mature, all other things being equal.
At any rate, what riscV really did so far was to make 8bit MCUs irrelevant. I used to use a lot of 8 bit parts even with M0 around, but now with chips like the CH32v003 and family, it’s just ridiculous to even contemplate.
I mean you can hook up an 8pin MCU and a couple of resistors to a vga monitor and a keyboard and have a a computer in a heat shrink tube that walks circles around my ancient apple II for $0.60.
And if you want WiFi, BLE, and some other wireless stuff, with 3x the speed and 100x the memory, the riscV esp32 chips come in at about $1, and they can do pretty strong edge AI. It’s all just silly at this point, and it’s riscV that caused that sea change.
(which you didn’t explicitly state, so I apologize for thinking it that way)
….of the launching of arch64 with the launching of the RiscV ISA.
They were both theoretically clean slate designs, but one was made by a bunch of academics and the other by a company with decades of ISA design expertise. I’d expect the latter to be much, much more mature, all other things being equal.
At any rate, what riscV really did so far was to make 8bit MCUs irrelevant. I used to use a lot of 8 bit parts even with M0 around, but now with chips like the CH32v003 and family, it’s just ridiculous to even contemplate.
I mean you can hook up an 8pin MCU and a couple of resistors to a vga monitor and a keyboard and have a a computer in a heat shrink tube that walks circles around my ancient apple II for $0.60.
And if you want WiFi, BLE, and some other wireless stuff, with 3x the speed and 100x the memory, the riscV esp32 chips come in at about $1, and they can do pretty strong edge AI. It’s all just silly at this point, and it’s riscV that caused that sea change.