Linux 4.17 Sees Port To Andes NDS32 CPU Architecture

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 4.17 Sees Port To Andes NDS32 CPU Architecture

While Linux 4.17 is set to drop support for some older/unmaintained CPU architectures, it looks like it will land at least one new port for Linux 4.17 for the Andes NDS32 CPU architecture...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.17-Andes-NDS32

[uid313]

Who cares about this, and why would anyone want to use this when they can use ARM or RISC-V?

[unixfan2001]

Who cares about this, and why would anyone want to use this when they can use ARM or RISC-V?

RISC-V is nowhere near production ready and ARM CPUs aren't even in the same ballpark.

[Dawn]

Who cares about this, and why would anyone want to use this when they can use ARM or RISC-V?

Plenty of people care. Andes is not a low-volume processor family - they've shipped multiple billions of cores. It's just not into big flashy things like smartphones. It competes with Tensilica, Cortus, and ARC in deep-embedded control-core applications.

RISC-V will probably do well; Andes themselves is now offering RISC-V cores with their own ISA extensions - but it's still new, and until relatively recently, didn't have much ecosystem. Things like extensive RTOS support, optimized DSP libs, availability of hard macro, etc, all matter, and while RISC-V is making progress on all of the above, it's still a fairly new development.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

low-power/small-frootprint scenarios.

[coder]

Andes had me thinking South American, which piqued my interest. But they appear to be Taiwanese.

http://www.andestech.com/about.php?id=13