CNX Software: Year 2021 in Review
takyon writes:
Year 2021 in review - Top 10 posts and statistics
The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards.
We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it's getting really close with the first board expected in H1 2022. I promise! The company still introduced the RK3566 and RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processors with plenty of I/O for AIoT use cases. There was less to announce on Amlogic side with [the] S908X processor still being very elusive (or has it been canceled?), but we still got news of [an] Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53processor be found next year in the upcoming Khadas VIM4 single board computer. Allwinner hasn't released any really interesting [Arm] processors in the last couple of years, and 2021 was not different.
Instead, the most exciting announcement from Allwinner was their RISC-V processor namely [the] Allwinner D1 and D1s/F133, the first affordable RISC-V Linux processors found in boards such as Nezha and Lichee RV. In other RISC-V news, higher-end RISC-V cores were announced like the StarFive Dubhe (Cortex-A75 like) and SiFive Performance P650 (Cortex-A77 like) and should start to be found in new SoCs in 2022 or 2023. Espressif launched the ESP32-C3 WiFi & BLE SoC, announced the ESP32-H2 with BLE 5.2, ZIgbee and Thread connectivity, and we got announcements for a wider variety of RISC-V microcontroller or processors for televisions, the automotive market, the Smart Home with more Bluetooth LE 5.3 and Zigbee MCU, as well as artificial intelligence, and more.
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