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>> The most likely route to an ultra low cost design is likely one of the large semiconductor vendors producing and selling a derivative design. This is proba
by petra 10y ago
>> The most likely route to an ultra low cost design is likely one of the large semiconductor vendors producing and selling a derivative design.
This is probably also a requirement for competitiveness on size/power/etc - because of the manufacturing and other advantages the big guys have.
So for the medium term, this means you need to find a different niche, and possibly a niche that the big guys don't want to copy, or can't copy.
So replacing peripherials with minion cores is a smart move. Same with customization for medium volume customers. Both goes against the business models of semi companies - extracting a price on every different feature.
But your other big innovation ,tagged memory, do you think it will get copied ?
Also what kind of imrpovements would you like to see contributed by the open-source community ?
- asb 10y agoI think we need to do more work to demonstrate the advantages of tagged memory to potential adopters. I hope that the cost/benefit ratio will be such that others will adopt it. As for other improvements, it's difficult to pick out specific projects. Off the top of my head, the work on an efficient out-of-order RISC-V core BOOM (https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom/ https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom/) is exciting, peripherals such as USB or memory controllers are valuable, and there's a lot to be done in terms of benchmarking and performance analysis.