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Comment by okso | Hacker News Reader

RISC-V might change the game soon with chips such as the Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU.

> Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 is a 32-bit RISC-V wireless microcontroller with support for 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 dual-mode, and an 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee, Thread, and Matter designed for IoT applications. [1]

Boufallo chips are becoming available on Pine64 products (Ox64, Star64, Pinecil) [2].

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/12/29/boufallo-lab-bl616-b... [2] https://www.pine64.org/2022/11/15/november-update-tuned-in/

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Maybe, but Espressif already has their own RISC-V chip (ESP32-C), which is perfectly compatible with their development platform (IDF), with a Thread-compatible model (ESP32-H2) coming next year.

Both cheap and profiting from the big community.

I'll buy an Ox64 (the ability to run Linux interested me), but Espressif isn't giving up easily. A few years ago, when Espressif was in more of a niche, it would've been an advantage to not have to use their weird Xtensa instruction set. But nowadays most toolchains have apparently added support and it's not a big problem anymore.

It seems to be a direct competitor to the ESP32-C6 which also has WiFi 6, BLE and 802.15.4. It will only be supported in v5.1 of the IDF, so not quite there yet.

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs

The Linux support on the Ox64 is supposedly pretty poor so far.

Direct links to Pine64 products ...

128Mb Ox64 SBC - $8 USD https://pine64.com/product/128mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decem...

16Mb Ox64 SBC - $6 USD https://pine64.com/product/16mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decemb...

Both currently out of stock, schedule restock in January 2023.

It’s not the matter of CPU arch, raw performance or even power consumption.

“640KB of RAM” is all you ever need in a great range of use cases that isn't currently well explored, and ESP8266/ESP32 serves that market very well with Arduino IDE integration and affordable devkits.

e: added absolutely necessary positivity to languages, sorry!

If they hit the price that could be really interesting.

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