6 ms·
Show HN: R8 Processor
- bedros 9y agobe careful with trademark from ARM, they already have R5 and R7 cpus, I'm not sure about R8
- Cyph0n 9y agoThere is the Audi R8 sports car, but I guess this is unrelated enough?
- agumonkey 9y agoClearly the day Audi is threatened by a processor they need to quit building cars.
- Cyph0n 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised if there were auto manufacturers that build processors for vehicle control units completely in-house.
- jacquesm 9y agoMost are made by specialist companies, think Bosch, Steyr (sp?) and Delphi.
- joshu 9y agoIt's ok. As long as this doesn't have AWD it will branch well.
- godmodus 9y agoCan use same name for a different product catigory. Same catogory -> somebody gonna geta hurt
- tilt_error 9y agoUnless it is relaterade to apple(s).
- ajb 9y agoIntel discovered to their cost that you can't trademark a number (hence 80486->pentium). Don't know if one letter is enough :-)
- Symmetry 9y agoNobody can trademark the name "Windows" as applied to actual windows. And I'm free to create a trademarked chain of "Windows" restaurants. But I can't call my operating system "Windows" and I'm on thin ice calling any other sort of computer program "Windows."
- milankragujevic 9y agoAllwinner has an R8 IoT SoC based on the A13.
- kersny 9y agoThe C.H.I.P. guys (and maybe Allwinner themselves) use R8 as a CPU name: https://getchip.com/ https://getchip.com/ http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner_SoC_Family#.22R.22-Series http://linux-sunxi.org/Allwinner_SoC_Family#.22R.22-Series
- Sanddancer 9y agoThey do have an R8 core, but they don't have a trademark on that part of the name[1], they just have one for Cortex. However, the name should probably be changed for removing confusion anyways, because Renesas has an R8C series of CISC microcontrollers [2]. The namespace around single letter and then a number processor model is real crowded. [1] https://www.arm.com/about/trademarks/arm-trademark-list/ https://www.arm.com/about/trademarks/arm-trademark-list/ [2] https://www.renesas.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers-microprocessors/r8c.html https://www.renesas.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers-micr...
- bem94 9y agoCool project! I see lots of toy RISC CPUs but rarely anything CISCy. This sort of thing is great as a house-keeping core for bigger RTL designs, especially as it is synthesis-able. Are you planning to extend the ISA at all?
- jacquesm 9y agoI'm not sure if < 40 instructions should count as 'CISC' by any definition. Besides the instructions that are implemented fall squarely in the 'RISC' domain: low count, very few addressing modes, memory access separate from operations.
- microtherion 9y ago"Move immediate value to memory address" seems like a prototypically CISCy operation to me.
- ajb 9y agoTypical CISC is an instructions which uses both a load/store pipeline slot and an ALU pipeline slot. 'move immediate to address' just uses a load/store slot and fits into a normal risc microarchitecture; the reason you don't normally get it is encoding constraints: the address typically uses the instruction bits where the immediate would go. Looking at the source, though, this processor uses a variable length instruction; so it is at least a bit CISCy.
- Taniwha 9y agoI sort of consider x86 ISAs barely CISCy - almost all x86 instructions that access memory involve a single address (so one TLB dip even if you're doing RMW) - this makes it easy to decompose instructions into uOPs. IMHO 'Real' CISCs potentially have multiple memory addresses "add m1, m2, m3" sort of things and addressing modes that do double indirections (remember a worst case VAX instruction could generate [I think] 27 different TLB misses which meant that the smallest process had to have an at least 27 page minimum working set to let every program progress - for a RISC machine it's just 2) Really though what happened between RISC/CISC was largely driven by a change in the relative speeds of memory and CPUs - CISCs made sense when memory bandwidth was low and heavy encoding reduced instruction bandwidth, RISCs (or RISCish including x86s) have come to dominate as caches moved on-chip and bandwidth soared
- cryptarch 9y agoWhat's the license?
- ruchira66 9y agoit's free for personal and commercial use.
- cryptarch 9y agoPerhaps you could add a mention of the license on the project page and/or at the top of the file? If I'm understanding you right don't have a former license yet. You could use something like MIT, Apache 2.0, CC0, GPL, LGPL or WTFPL, that would fit your comment. I think MIT or Apache 2.0 would be the safest choices (if you don't have a preference for GNU/copyleft licenses). I'm afraid a HN comment won't hold up in court as proof I have a license to use a work.
- gravypod 9y agoAre there any FPGAs that can fit into the PCI slot of Thinkpads (specifically my X220). I want to play around with them but I don't want to lug around 30 development boards and cables.
- amenghra 9y agoGet an icestick (fpga on a USB stick). You can use an entire open source tool chain (thanks to great reverse engineering work) although I would use the default tools even if it implies running Windows in a VM. Some other boards a pretty small. I have a Xilinx Spartan; really easy to carry around.
- jfktrey 9y agoSecond the default tools. The open source tools are really cool, but especially if you're just starting out, the proprietary tools are much gentler in helping you debug your own mistakes.
- vanjoe 9y agoI wouldn't say lattice tools are super helpful, I've spent more hours cursing icecube2 than I care to recall.
- oakwhiz 9y agoThere is a design for one that will replace the cellular card. You need a BIOS firmware that will not whitelist PCI-E devices. https://github.com/polysome/aggregate-1/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/polysome/aggregate-1/blob/master/README.m...
- gravypod 9y agoThat looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Running Coreboot would probably work with something like this so that's what I'd do if someone ever actually sold these. I assume I don't need to take it out of my laptop to use it. Hopefully I can program/flash the SD card from the system.
- jlebrech 9y agohow does verilog then translate onto a chip, does it try to fit it into the space? are there any tutorials for this?