Nordic Semiconductor announces nRF54 series with ARM Cortex and RISC-V co-processor

Some well known Nordic features like cursed footprint remains untouched, so everything is ok.

I wonder if this is a transition strategy ... give us the ARM we know ... sprinkled with some RISC until everyone gets comfortable?

- Gough

... because I'm sure choosing such a chip would reduce the RISC of having the wrong core ...

- Gough

I think the core type is not important but it's properties are. In most cases RISC-V core included in SoC has much less capabilities than ARM but has better properties in terms of power consumption, simplicity, occupied die area and overal cost. For example Maxim describes reasons why they did selected RISC-V instead of yet another CM4 in MAX32655 chip (from practical point of view MAX32655 is competitor to Nordic nrf5 chips including this new one and target similar applications): https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/the-max32655-why-two-cores-are-better-than-one.html

Well, I would be inclined to agree ... there has always been a RISC/CISC ideology battle. Beyond a point, you get into the complexity of large ISAs such as x86-64 where some chip designs are actually instead breaking complex instructions down .... while some of ARM's IP is gaining complexity to meet increasing performance demands and perhaps losing a little efficiency in the process.

But perhaps what is most interesting to me for RISC-V is the open, royalty-free nature ... no licensing fees may make a bit of difference for low-cost/high-volume applications. Many sensor nodes really don't need much "brains" because there's very rudimentary on-device processing in most cases (although I think this may change in the future) - so if the die is small, simple, uses low-power ... I'm all for it :).

- Gough

As misaz mentioned about the competition and MAC32655 is a competitor for the Nordic nrf5 series of chips, I guess Nordic might be well aware of another competitor and that's ESP32. Some of the Esp series has RISC processors and I guess this one will for sure can challenge it as it has advantages of both ARM and RISC. The Nordic is saying that there will be multiple of these processors in one SoC meaning for sure this device can do ML tasks faster then others.

I think in case of ML more important will become dedicated accelerators independent on CPU rather than fast CPU. This trend we can see for example in Renesas MPU announced last years. Some MCUs with AI accelerators are also comming to market and some fo them are already avalaible. For example MAX78000, MAX78002 with CNN accelerator (64 small computational cores optimized for ML operations), but these mentioned has no BLE.

Interesting that they have both ARM Cortex and RISC-V architectures.  I can't help but to sing the old Lovin' Spoonful song, "Did you Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?"

Good thoughts..