[okso]

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/

[solarkraft]

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.

[petre]

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

[omniscient_oce]

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

[notpublic]

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.

[numpad0]

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!

[ilyt]

If they hit the price that could be really interesting.