I realized after posting that this is a personal blog, not a corporate one - so I do regret and apologize for being rather blunt.

(I think the .io and me misreading as “etherway” made me think it was company-published and for right or wrong I assume companies only ever blog for brand recognition, so am probably over critical of them)

That’s partly a big compliment - your blog is really well styled and easy to read.

RISC-V is a fairly popular topic on HN, and for me at least it’s really interesting as both a low-level nerd, as well as curiosity about what impact it may have given we lived in an x86 world for a long time, before ARM really took hold, and now that there’s a new player and it’s an open standard is really interesting.

Could it be the “Linux kernel” of the hardware world? I have probably 20x ESP8266s doing various things in my life, maybe 5x ESP32-Sx, and will probably pick up a few -Cx, and they’ll be the first RISC-V device I own.

Ah ok, I see. Although I don't fully comprehend what you are saying.

The main feature seems to be that it's an open architecture, so you don't have to rely on the things that a manufacturer provides you.

I also added your comparison table to the article.

And thank you for the compliment!

You don't need xtensa toolchain and use whatever your distro ships for one.

A drawback is that ESP32 RISCV cores don't feature FPU, if I am remembering correctly.

>I know the ESP32-Cx is based on the RISC-V architecture. Could you elaborate why this is a feature or in what way this is an advantage?

Long term support. As Espressif has publicly declared their intent to fully move to RISC-V, it is not in your interest long-term to base your designs on the ISA that's been deprecated.