https://hackaday.com/2020/10/22/stm32-clones-the-good-the-ba...
Having an openly implementable ISA is just one less thing to worry about
You will find Chinese companies at forefront of riscv development (ie Alibaba) and Huawei harmonyos supports riscv.
I don’t know why the article doesn’t mention this aspect.
Secondary challenge here, going beyond the ISA, are pre-defined blocks of functionality already implemented (eg: an ethernet controller, internal CPU busses, memory controllers, etc). Even in the RISC-V world many of these are commercial and require a license.
deterred by the size of the profits for the winners, and the losses for those who do not compete in global markets.. yet I suggest there are few things more interesting than a personal, general purpose computer
Other features you're likely to want are also included in the specification, so if you want to write code that uses for example the B bit manipulation extension or the V vector extension (which is scalable with vector width as well, unlike SSE/AVX) you just have to check a standardized 'CPUID' bit and can run your code, and otherwise fall back to other code.
I also believe that the spec may let operating systems hook these instructions and provide fallbacks so application developers don't have to, but I'm not too sure on the specifics of the privileged ISA of RISC-V.
Boards are getting designed for a specific chip and you are extremely unlikely to change that - unless the original is no longer available. Re-engineering for a new chip can be a massive pain - even if the new one is pin-compatible. If you are delivering high-quality products, you are not going to switch.
With the exception of some trivial ones, western manufacturers don't really make pin-compatible chips. Creating a chip which is electronically identical is not easy at all - and don't forget you probably have to make it firmware-compatible as well. The end result is that you now have exactly the same product as your competitor, so you are now competing primarily on price and making it easier for your customers to leave you. Oh, and you open yourself up to lawsuits too. Creating unique products is way for those manufacturers.
On the other hand, eastern manufacturers are more than happy to create exact clones. A lot of shitty electronics don't really care too much about things like longevity, warranty, compatibility, or even regulations. Just make sure it functions well enough to make it out of the store. So a manufacturer like GigaDevice creates the GD32F103, which is pretty much a clone of the STM32F103 by STMicroelectronics - down to firmware compatibility. Won't get used in any product whose brand you recognize, but with the ongoing chip shortage they are definitely selling like hot cakes.
But implementing an instruction set is not easy, and ARM might actually try to do something about it if you do it without their permission. With RISC-V, you can just grab any random implementation! Perhaps even an open-source one? GigaDevice has already released their first RISC-V clone: the GD32VF103. Again a clone of the STM32F103, but you now need to recompile for a different ISA.
So unless there was a pin-for-pin/electrical standard for chips, the ISA is of no effect.
First of all, we aren't really talking about motherboards or CPUs here. It is embedded electronics, not desktop computing. They are highly specialized application-specific electronics, which require a lot of engineering time to design, validate, and certify. It is nothing at all like the computer ecosystem, where you can just swap in a different motherboard. Boards are designed to use very specific chips, with a chip swap easily costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Second, the chip shortage is mostly affecting "legacy" chips - which have often been available for a decade or more. The applications they are being used in do not really require a lot of processing power, but they do need to be extremely reliable. We are talking about things like Atmel's ATmega32u4, which was initially released in 2008. Can't really do a lot, but plenty of power for some obscure automotive module.
Although recycling is technically sort-of possible, it is extremely labor-intensive. Even with the current shortage and associated price hike, it isn't really economically viable. Even worse, the resulting chips are of unknown quality: you simply don't know what happened to them! And exhaustively testing them isn't really possible either. Are you willing to buy a car with an airbag controller which contains a chip they dug out of a landfill? Newly manufactured hardware has a known quality, which means you can guarantee it works properly.
On the other hand, we are wasting a lot of opportunities on the other side of the usage cycle. Electronics can often be repaired, but we throw them away instead. Look at smartphone and laptop manufacturers, for example: often they just throw out an entire logic board when a single chip is defective. A skilled technician could replace that chip, but smartphone and laptop manufacturers are actively trying to obstruct this. It is "reduce, reuse, recycle" for a reason: recycling should be the the last resort - not the first.
A skilled technician replacing a 2¢ part on a $10 board costs more than a new $10 board. Just disassembling that board to recycle parts off of it will cost more than the board originally cost to manufacture.
You also run into the same argument against landfill airbag controllers. A factory that produces a million boards can have very good reliability metrics. A skilled technician not only has more variable output but less accurate quality metrics unless they put a lot of extra effort into process controls.
A recycled board will cost more and be statistically less reliable from a brand new board. It would be more efficient to just mechanically separate them to extract raw materials.
> It depends.
I hardly ever give up a computer, we still have a '98 Windows laptop doing recipe duty in the kitchen. (It's getting harder to find a small 32 bit Linux distro these days, though.) Energy efficiency is another concern, one machine I took to be "recycled" (I know--maybe or maybe not) was a Mac G4 which was good as a space heater in the winter, but that's about it--and I didn't feel like moving it 1500 miles with our latest relocation.
I started with electronics many years ago, and would balk at replacing a surface mount chip, but people could learn basic electronic repair literacy for things that commonly break like cords which would help a lot. I also don't tend to buy products like smart phones which are glued together and difficult to repair.
As for RISC-V, it is hard to find even a dev board with the chip shortages (I bought a HiFive Inventor kit to experiment with as a first project):
Additionally, and not knowing much about the hardware side of things, if I put myself in the shoes of a manufacturer, it seems challenging to ship a product where the expected lifetime of some of its components is unknown. Support and warranties would be affected too.
Over the last 40 years all manner of circuits composed of discrete components have been replaced with chips. Voltage regulation is a chip, battery protection is a chip, rectification is a chip.
https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hi....
I am more than happy to chance my mind, if provided evidence.
https://www.waferworld.com/post/9-things-you-might-not-have-...
