Today we are used to luxury of fully integrated microcontrollers - all key components are conveniently integrated into single reliable part: non-volatile memory, SRAM, CPU core, PLL, ADC/DAC, PWM, serial ports, e.t.c It was not like that in the past and embedded systems typically required lots of chips, until Intel 8048 (MCS-48) was released in 1976 on n-MOS technology. Intel expected that 8048 will have limited product lifetime, and in 4 years, in 1980 it was replaced by 8051 (MCS-51) which conquered the world. It was first high-volume product to integrate 4KiB of PROM, 128 bytes of SRAM, GPIO, serial port as well as 8-bit core in a single crystal. 87C51FC variant was using 32KiB EPROM non-volatile memory instead of PROM's, double SRAM size (256 byte), C-version was manufactured on CMOS process - which makes it exceptionally modern for the time. It was not particularly fast - simplest commands took 12 clock cycles to execute, so even at 20Mhz it was doing just over 1 million operations per second, also - no 16-bit division commands. Modern 8051-compatible cores are much faster and often do single-cycle command execution.
Recently I got my hands on D87C51FC-20, and decided to experience the old ways of embedded software.
I was originally from Belarus, but as you mention - I am indeed in Zürich for some years.
Still, I can assure you, 99% of people in Belarus do work on x86, and cutting edge x86 hardware is being sold freely. Technological sanctions failed many years ago and at some point I will need to write an article about that...
Nearly all Linux packages you might want to install - work with nothing special required. Migration to ARM earlier this century made vast majority of open source software portable. Precompiled x86-only surely will not work.
USB 3.0 host controllers and hubs do not need to consume large amounts of power nor do they need to always be active, if designed well. USB 3.0 has LPM (link power management) and Microsoft wrote up a nice overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/u...
Same. This seems to be the SoC and board I have been waiting a long time for.
Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement.
It should be fun to play with it this summer, and further down the line it will become my home server, replacing an old atom board that's considerably weaker.
That's mostly enabled by the builtin I/O (pcie slots, sata ports...).
+1 on your initial comment. Exactly how I feel about the current situation.
MilkV Oasis with SG2380 would be the end-game for majority of developers, but they are definitely loosing money if they keep starting price at 120 USD. They don't have it frozen (they changed the SoC specification some weeks ago) thus I wouldn't be surprised to see this slip into 2025. I wouldn't be surprised if this outperforms MilkV Pioneer.
> Do not forget to preorder, to get the unbelievably low price listed in their announcement.
I don't know much about the RISC-V ecosystem at the moment, but what do you consider an "unbelievably low price"?
They SoC appears to be £5 to pre-order (EDIT: £5 is for a 20% off coupon), but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200. Is this considered a good deal for RISC-V right now?
> but the motherboard to use it on appears to be ~£1200
Not sure what you're looking at as you didn't give a link, but perhaps you're confusing Pioneer and Oasis?
The 64 core Pioneer prebuilt with case, power supply, SSD, video card, 128 GB RAM for $2500 is quite reasonably priced against commercially built 16 core x86 machines, if your workload can keep 64 cores busy. Each core is around 1/4 the speed of current x86, but there are four times as many.
Don't forget 64 core x86 is $5000 just for the chip.
