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RISC-V: Free Core, Some Assembly Required
- nickpsecurity 11y agoI didn't know a board was on the way with 28nm chips. That's exciting. The only thing that threw me is that Grey could fit 400 RISC-V cores on one FPGA. Makes me wonder what type of core and FPGA he was using...
- _chris_ 11y agoI believe Jan Gray was only implementing RV32I, but he was manually laying out the core and the router himself! You can find his slides here (http://riscv.org/workshop-jan2016.html http://riscv.org/workshop-jan2016.html).
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThanks for the link! re cores They don't appear to have floating point. That a pre-requisite for quite a few accelerator cases. Also could help explain how many he fits in there at what performance. re FPGA BOOM! I was thinking it was an UltraScale or Achronix given the numbers. So, that was a hit. re NOC Probably the most exciting thing there. I'm guessing he's going to license it. Might be able to use it in open projects or even ASIC's depending. I lack the expertise to speak on the latter except to say that the existence of EDA companies specializing in NOC generation means such a thing might be useful. Also, good to know we can hit this kind of performance on an UltraScale. Makes me more hopeful about what can be achieved with an open 45nm or 28nm FPGA once we get them. Archipelago is progress in that area at 45-65nm already.
- tacos 11y agoThat's the 32 bit integer subset, floating point is available. Plenty of stuff can get away with integer-only. Massive numbers of Xilinx DSP48 on a FPGA is pretty common.
- ex3ndr 11y agoCan this be used in production? To make NSA-free servers?
- creshal 11y agoEventually, in a few years, once hardware and software is actually available… and assuming neither the NSA nor anyone else introduces hardware backdoors in the factory. Have fun looking for sabotaged transistors in a 28 or 14nm chip.
- nickik 11y agoAt the moment we have so many other problems that security in the production is barly on the radar. If we are at a point were production is the major secuirty problem, we are in a good place.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoYou have to use a secure lifecycle for the ASIC development and distribution. That requires a lot of work and money. So, no, these chips won't be NSA free. NSA will own them if they want to with a variety of attack points.
- SuperGent 11y ago[he] sported a beard that is a sign he is well along in working on his next-generation Epiphany processor. Thats where I'm going wrong..
- happycube 11y agoMore seriously, a RISC-V Epiphany would be quite cool, and potentially quite a bit more mainstreamish than the current one.
- protomyth 11y agoI do hope whoever puts out the first RISC-V powered motherboard makes it in a standard size that fits in existing cases. I hope it very much the same as an Intel motherboard with a RISC-V instead of an Intel CPU. Please don't make the funny development boards that ARM and MIPS vendors are making. Give us something we can put in a case, buy some memory and hard drives / SSDs, and get hacking on.
- unwind 11y agoDevelopment boards are not meant to be "funny", they're meant to expose all the features of a given CPU (or, more commonly SoC). This is for embedded users, who typically add the processor chip to their own products, i.e. they are not intended to be end-user personal computers for general purpose use.
- protomyth 11y agoI know they are for embedded systems and sorry if "funny" offended you, but I keep hearing these companies tell me how good their ARM, MIPS, POWER are going to be in my server then they ship embedded specific boards. I can go buy a Intel or AMD board for a PC and write / port software. I'm still waiting for the same from other manufactures. This is one reason I'm really not sold on the ARM server boards since every company makes it a pain in the rear to buy one.
- nickik 11y agoIt will be a long time yet, but in my lifetime I want to see a completely open source, open hardware laptop that is competitive in speed with closed source alternatives, and it will hopefully be a good deal safer. Security Researcher Joanna Rutkowska just released a concept for a stateless laptop, http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.html http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2015/12/23/state_harmful.htm.... A fully Trusted computing base all and a secure architecture for application in the user level. Lets make the future happen.
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- groovy2shoes 11y ago"Ports of a handful of Linux variants including FreeBSD are well underway..." When did FreeBSD become a Linux variant?
- protomyth 11y ago> When did FreeBSD become a Linux variant? I would imagine my answer is the same as yours: never. Just add the phrase to your indicators of poor and non-fact checked journalism. It helps tell if the author, article, and publication have any real value.