It's crazy what $5 can buy you in a microcontroller these days. Have a look at these Milk-V boards:

The duo has up to 256MB of memory, and a 1TOPS@INT8 TPU. They run Linux and are $5. I bought 5!

brucehoult 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Don't forget the 128 bit vector ISA with 32 registers, supporting up to 64 bit int and FP, and with LMUL=8 you can process 1024 bits with a single instruction (at 3 cycles per 128 bits for most operations). Fully supported by GCC and CLANG (xTHeadVector) and compatible with RVV 1.0 with just a command line switch if you use the C intrinsic functions. (a lot of code working on 8 bit elements is binary compatible with RVV 1.0 too e.g. typical memcpy(), memset(), memcmp(), strlen(), strcpy(), strcmp())

When I bought my 64 MB Duo they were $3!

Then for a long time they were $5 for the 64 MB, $7 for the 256 MB, and $10 for the 512 MB.

Sadly, like everything else, they've gone up considerably this year.

https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-duo

https://arace.tech/products/milkv-duo-s

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skippyfish 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can buy sub-$0.50 microcontrollers. But even at $5, I don't know why you'd want to run models on them, it's an environment constrained to the point of being useless for this task.

And I hope it stays that way, I don't want MCU shortages...

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dannyw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fun and learning is a really good reason. It also reminds me of the damascene: trying to achieve something that doesn't feel possible, and working through all the extreme resource-constrained engineering limits.

I think most of my embedded projects aren't that useful, but they've taught me a lot.

	▲	skippyfish 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not disagreeing with you, I think this goes beyond impractical, it's doomed from the get go. In my book, impractical means "I built a cuckoo wristwatch". Beyond impractical: "I built a cuckoo wristwatch but there was no room for a working mechanism".

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titzer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I want to run music models on the Milk-V and have them jam in realtime with me.

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NooneAtAll3 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

isn't floor price 0.10$ for last couple years?

	▲	skippyfish 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, that's sub-$0.50. But yeah, CH32V003 is in that ballpark, and some of the cheapest Microchip and Infineon products are around $0.20. It's almost never worth it to buy the cheapest chip unless you're making a million of something, but there are very good ones around $1-$2, and $5 is the upscale stuff.