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Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluat
by ktta 9y ago
Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits
https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/
The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've linked to.
My suggestion would be this[1]. It has a pretty large LUT count so you can go nuts. The RAM and Ethernet will be pretty useful if you want to run linux[2] and test out stuff. It'll be a bit hard to run linux on it right now.
On the other hand, you can choose a Parallela board[3] which comes with a FPGA chip along with a new (soon to be retired) arch called epiphany. Here[4] is a GSoC project which runs linux on that board using the FPGA.
[1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-trainer-board-recommended-for-ece-curriculum/ http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-traine...
[2]: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux
[3]: https://www.parallella.org/ https://www.parallella.org/
[4]: https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv
- e12e 9y agoI see that what they recommend for the freedom platform https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ today, is a dev board https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ that costs around 3500 USD: https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-kits/xilinx/ek-v7-vc707-g-3074457345626227804/ https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k... Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?
- q3k 9y agoA somewhat speed-optimized IP CPU core [1] runs at 600DMIPs on a Virtex7. I would hope that SiFive is in the same ballpark, but it's probably slower. Even in a best-case scenario, this is nowhere near a low end consumer PC. edit: For reference, my 5 years old Thinkpad x230 does around 7400 DMIPs per core. [1] - https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html
- e12e 9y agoWell, that actually sounds a lot better than I feared - I have a aging aspire acer one that works fine as a lightweight Linux desktop.
- brucehoult 9y agoThe $3500 board is a lot, yes. There is also a $99 "Arty" board that is enough to run what is in the HiFive1, and I think even to add an MMU and run Linux. The $3500 one has enough space to do multiple cores, FPU and so forth as well. Both the $99 and $3500 FPGA boards run a Rocket CPU at 65 MHz, which is pretty slow, though faster than you get with a software cycle-accurate simulator on a workstation.