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They best not be suggesting that they run a RISC-V in the fpga.
by gaze 11y ago
They best not be suggesting that they run a RISC-V in the fpga.
- cesarbs 11y agoIt's the fifth bullet point in the list at the top of the page.
- gaze 11y agoEither they buy a risc-v chip someone taped out or they synthesize one in the FPGA. The latter will be competitive with 10-20 year old technology.
- kc5tja 11y agoI'm planning on using a soft-core processor because FPGA dev boards are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. My plans are to await silicon from LowRISC project before considering real glass.
- striking 11y agoPerhaps the goal is to eventually implement an ASIC version.
- gaze 11y agoTapeouts are many, many millions for something that will compete with anything in even your phone
- striking 11y agoYeah, I know. I didn't expect the goal to be reasonable. Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open. But good for them for trying something new.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago> "Nothing about the project is really all that reasonable, considering FPGAs are nearly entirely proprietary across the board, and because it'd be super expensive to make something that is actually truly open." The Kestrel-4 plans to use the ICE-40 as one of its platforms, and at the time of writing this the ICE-40 FPGA family is the most open of all FPGA devices (fully open source development toolchain, etc...). https://kestrelcomputer.github.io/kestrel/2016/04/01/announcing-k4 https://kestrelcomputer.github.io/kestrel/2016/04/01/announc...
- Narishma 11y agoAre you sure that's not an april fools hoax?
- ZenoArrow 11y agoWhy would it be? ICE-40 has a port of a RISC-V CPU. I couldn't see anything that would indicate it was an April Fool's joke, aside from the date.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoDid you see the specs? He went from a Commodore to a NUMA-scale machine that he will implement on a mix of Xilinx and ICE FPGA's. Not saying he can't do some fraction of it but those are some heavy specs.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoAfter reading it again, you're all quite right, I was wrong, it's an April Fool's joke. Still, the principal of a computer on an ICE FPGA is a good one, even if it's not currently being pursued by this guy.
- kc5tja 11y agoI'd like to try my hand at building my own iCE40-based motherboard for the Kestrel some day, but something like that would be at least two to three years into the future minimum, especially at my current rate of progress working solo. It's best to not have any expectations.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoSure, but he doesn't have to fund it himself, other groups have expressed an interest in creating a RISC-V ASIC, he could use one of those chips when it's ready.
- kc5tja 11y agoThat's the plan.