cant wait to see a few projects actually using this MC, some practical applications instead of just flashing an led as thats pretty boring and does not really sell me on this over any other MC

Im pretty sure that these are on Ali Express. They were $2-3 Canadian, which is still an unbelievable price. I bought myself a box of microcontrollers to have something to do over the winter. These look like they are better documented than some of the LilyGo devices that I bought.They were a lot more than a couple of dollars.

Trust the toolchain?

Real single wire debug interface like STM8S. But HAL lib uses too much FLASH. Hope WCH could release register type library.

Now we need Rust toolchain for this IC and I would call it a day 🙂

thanks for highlighting it and where to find it.

Assembly isn't too bad. It's processor-dependent, so you have to learn it for every kind of chip for which you're programming. My university had it pretty early in the curriculum, I think sophomore year or earlier. And we learned on a DEC VAX. Given the reduced instruction set of RISC, it's expected that you will have to do more work at the coding level anyhow — but usually mostly through loops of some complexity or another. If you know how the newer chips do a routine, you can usually pretty much figure out how to code it – but code optimization is extra-important in such low-level RISC libraries. Back in the day, the selling point was that the chip could essentially run a bit faster because it couldn't do as many things. But looking at that paltry 48 MHz clock speed, I'd say it is more of a miniaturization benefit, and all that comes from that (half as far goes twice as fast, even for electricity…). Even with the benefits of assembly, that 2K of SRAM seems extremely cramped, IMHO. But it's best to get people accustomed to working in that sort of constrained environment, and then see their eyes light up when they double it to 4K of SRAM. This is the sort of chip I would want running the AI auto-defense system of my tank, to protect it from RPGs… Simple (fits within 2K) repetitive looping tasks…

64-bit chip unique ID… Wow… So every one of these things is incrementally different where it comes to the unique ID. I'm imagining little assassin mosquito drones running with these super-tiny RISC chips in them… Forgive me, but I just spent the last half hour watching drone videos from Ukraine… I wonder how much of that physical package is actually the chip inside? I suspect that it's significantly artificially larger than it COULD be, just to make it compatible with circuit board designs. Has anyone made a laser layer-by-layer etching video of one of these packages to see how large the silicon is?

They have a Linux Version 😀

Cool.

Are we seeing a new Arduino 🤩?

Love the innovation in RISC V but it's a bit more complicated.  

Sure the instruction set is open source and there are virtual cores online to download and chuck into an FPGA, but the problem is it still requires a licence fee if you want to use one of the well developed ones for a real piece of hardware. Most people use a core from SiFive or similar who've done an incredible amount of good work. Now Intel is behind it, it's going to be interesting. Of course it takes a LOT of engineering to optimise a completely new processor whatever the instruction set, so unless you have a massive budget the options are currently a bit limited.

The cost isn't much different from using ARM at their lowest tier pricing. ARM is of course amazingly mature with advanced compilers, reference designs, debuggers and so on. One of the reasons ARM is much cheaper than it used to be, is due to the long term threat from RISC V; competition is a great thing.  

If the Nvidia purchase of ARM Ltd had gone ahead, there would have been an urgent need for many vendors to hedge their bets and rush into RISC V. Now that's been blocked by the European regulators, it's less critical, but still a very active area right now. Microcontrollers offer the most upside right now, rather than servers and desktops although they are beginning to trickle out too.