alt Hacker NewsThis is a "microcontroller core", not a "microcontroller".
We're talking "deep embedded" applications - where an ASIC is designed for a very specific purpose, and that design just so happens to call for a programmable CPU core to be included in it.
This is the kind of design that lives in your keyboard, your mouse, your USB stick, your USB hub, your HDD, your SSD, your eMMC chip, your memory card and more. Remember: you're never more than 3 meters away from an 8051 core.
I do agree that most of this piece is nitpicking - poking at ultra low level things that are largely irrelevant to the tried and true "deep embedded" exercise of Just Ship It.
No one really gives a shit if an operation takes one instructions or two, or which instruction sets are consistently present in different cores. What "deep embedded" people give a shit about is not having to work with ancient 8051 tooling and 8 bit ALUs and memory banked 64kb spaces while writing code for the one core they happen to actually have. And RISC-V got that. The piece actually agrees with that sentiment.
Replies
I thought cortex-m0 was taking over that slice of the pie.
By volume, I would expect the majority of microcontroller silicon shipped to be these kinds of deeply embedded cores. They even show up in chips called “microcontrollers.”
Å microcontroller needs a microcontroller core.
EDIT: Leaving that Å in. For some reason, iOS on iPad is obsessed with autocorrecting "A" to "Å" even when using the English keyboard. It's driving me nuts.