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"Not everything exists for RISC-V that exists for the other ones, but that is filling in at incredible pace." The RISC-V project is now 7 years old. Remember t
by morio123 9y ago
"Not everything exists for RISC-V that exists for the other ones, but that is filling in at incredible pace."
The RISC-V project is now 7 years old. Remember that the 6502 and its supporting hardware went from proposal to final silicon in 2 years. And that was done using a hand drawn layout.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoThe 6502 was also far more primitive; doesn't seem like a useful comparison point.
- tyingq 9y ago~3500 transistors vs millions (tens of millions? hundreds?)
- Flow 9y agoBut the tooling is much better today. I read that the layout of the 6502 was mostly made by one person. https://research.swtch.com/6502 https://research.swtch.com/6502
- nickpsecurity 9y agoThey also weren't working in contraints of 1000+ design rules today's nodes would need for custom design.
- CalChris 9y agoThat may be but RISC is supposed to be simple (or if you prefer, reduced) and back then the 6502 had no infrastructure to speak of. 7 years is unquestionably a long time and then if you go to the RISC-V spec and look at lucky chapter 13, "B" Standard Extension for Bit Manipulation it says: This chapter is a placeholder for a future standard extension to provide bit manipulation instructions, including instructions to insert, extract, and test bit fields, and for rotations, funnel shifts, and bit and byte permutations. It is cheaper than ARMv8 but that's about it.
- baobrien 9y agoUC Berkeley has had functional RISC-V silicon for years now as research devices. RISC-V hasn't really been a thing outside of their architecture research group for more than a few years now. The UCB-BAR also has some fairly decent RISC-V cores (BOOM and Rocket) available as open source RTL.