[K0balt]

Yes, in a sense. But that is not an apt comparison at all, really.

ISA design is a complex endeavor. Arch64 benefited from multiple factors directly attributable to ARMs prior art, domain knowledge, and market positioning.

There is a huge distinction between a globally recognized and dominant ISA engineering firm coming out with a “new” ISA that their engineers had been prepping for for years, and the effort required to create a novel ISA and ecosystem from scratch.

One is just another day at the office, while the other is a very riscy endeavor that requires amassing the talent, creating incentives, creating an engineering culture, and trying to create a niche in a market that was arguably fully populated by other options. And then, you still have to create an entire family of ISAs to match various specification levels.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison.

[klelatti]

Hmmm. I didn’t make any comparison. I just pointed out that AArch64 isn’t 30 odd years old.

[K0balt]

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.

[klelatti]

No worries and thanks for sharing your experiences with RISC-V MCUs - really interesting.

FWIW I agree that AArch64's launch was not the same as the RISC-V launch. There has clearly been a lot more work required to boot the RISC-V ecosystem and they have made amazing progress. Arm had the advantage of incumbency and a lot more resources.

At the same time I think the have oversold progress on application level processors and I don't think this does RISC-V any favours at all. Arm has a lot of experience and the general tone from some of the RISC-V commentary is that they got it 'wrong' with AArch64 which, to be charitable, is unproven.