8 ms·
A smaller, cheaper RISC V board
- chubs 9y agoI wonder if you can program this with Rust? There seems to be some support for a LLVM backend which would suggest 'yes'. However the gcc linker is still required which I'm unclear on whether that rules it out: https://riscv.org/software-tools/low-level-virtual-machine-llvm/ https://riscv.org/software-tools/low-level-virtual-machine-l...
- problems 9y agoNice. That's a big improvement in price over the previous ones. I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86 CPUs? In the microcontroller market there's a lot of competition right now, especially with devices like the ESP32 going for $8 with wifi and bluetooth.
- jhgb 9y agoI haven't studied it in detail but my mental picture of RISC-V is it being an attempt at a modern, clean, patent-unencumbered ISA suitable for use from microcontrollers to large systems. The suitability progress in this effort may naturally be uneven (low-power microcontrollers with "straightforward" basic implementations would be usable long before large SMP servers with wide out-of-order cores and powerful atomics and IPC features, for example). At this point, it would be very lovely and educational to see an Oberon system (http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/) ported to these small boards. (It could definitely use more memory to run a desktop system, though.)
- problems 9y agoMakes sense, I guess I shouldn't really assume otherwise, that's how ARM is used these days. I hope we'll see some competition on the actual microcontrollers and stuff to push that price down further.
- Koshkin 9y agoMore memory, and a video controller. (I can imagine a PS/2 port implemented through GPIO, but a video controller can only be done using a separate chip.)
- zokier 9y agoOverall I think it would be neat to see a "hackable" (2D) video controller emerge too. There are quite a lot of "small systems" that could use with an easy way to get decent video out (practically speaking HDMI, or maybe DP).
- dom0 9y agoA special chip isn't really needed for this, an FPGA can do all of the above (with the correct bitstream)
- zokier 9y agoFpga, discrete asic, or on-die on soc, that's just implementation detail. Of course I'd expect the first iterations to be fpga based, that's almost unavoidable these days.
- rjsw 9y agoA display controller that can drive HDMI and a 2D graphics accelerator are different things. They just both work from the same framebuffer in a SoC's memory.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoSoftware-generated video is definitely difficult to get working from scratch, limited in resolution, and expensive in CPU cycles, but it's been done on several microcontroller families [1] [2] [3]. You generally still need an external resistor network to do the D/A conversion, though. [1] http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/video/sx/gamesys.php [2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/03/avr-vga-generation.html http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/03/avr-vga-generation... [3] https://hackaday.io/project/8537-vga-blinking-lights https://hackaday.io/project/8537-vga-blinking-lights
- microcolonel 9y ago> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals - are they looking at the microcontroller market or are they looking more to offer an alternative for ARM and x86 CPUs? Their goal is to be the standard ISA for all general purpose computers; microcontrollers, embedded controllers, servers, HPC, workstations, laptops, smartphones. Microcontrollers happen to be one of the quickest markets to enter with a new ISA. > devices like the ESP32 going for $8 with wifi and bluetooth Well, give Espressif some time, they've been a member of the RISC-V foundation for a while; so I suspect they'll be dropping Tensilica for RISC-V at some point. Maybe we'll see a module like this with RISC-V cores in the nearish future. For now it surely isn't competing in the same part of the market. For what it's worth, the FE310 seems to basically lead in power and peak performance in its category; there are surely some use cases which it is already enabling.
- leggomylibro 9y agoWow, an Espressif device with a RISC-V core would be amazing, even if the power consumption/efficiency weren't quite top-notch. I'm not willing to put in the effort to get a deep knowledge of a brand like Tensilica when there are options like ST's or TI's ARM Cortex-M chips that blow it away in terms of peripherals, power, compatibility, tooling, etc. But an open standard has all kinds of ancillary benefits.
- pgeorgi 9y ago> I'm still a little unclear on RISC-V's goals Maybe a bit cynic, but given their churn in the lower level specifications (supervisor mode and up) my guess is: Main goal: write lots of theses and papers and obtain degrees. Secondary goal: have an unencumbered ISA to help with the main goal. Everything else depends on those who adopt the ISA. If some org is willing to spend the multi-million $$$ necessary to design a high-performance desktop class CPU (and more to make it a reality), it will happen. Those low-end chips are easier to do, and an easier market to serve: The ISA's license fees are a bigger chunk of the chip's price, so RISC-V dropping that to 0 helps more. You also don't need to build a high-end chip that blasts everything else out of the water before your newcomer is even considered, since in the microcontroller market there are several pockets of "good enough". If that works out, there might be attempts to scale up later (when they have experience and financial resources to work with).
- microcolonel 9y ago> Everything else depends on those who adopt the ISA. If some org is willing to spend the multi-million $$$ necessary to design a high-performance desktop class CPU (and more to make it a reality), it will happen. It's a good sign that NVIDIA and Qualcomm are both integrating RISC-V for embedded controllers on their chipsets. This means that there will be experience and maybe R&D going into RISC-V cores at these two massive vendors of embedded and mobile CPUs. It is not inconceivable that RISC-V could... cross-contaminate to their high-performance application processor business.
- pjmlp 9y agoYeah, but will they give it back in some form? The examples of contributions from big players using BSD like licenses, specially in the embedded space, proves otherwise.
- imtringued 9y agoWhy does that matter? The only thing they need to do is correctly implement the RISC-V ISA instead of a proprietary ISA.
- zokier 9y agoI think one of the short-term goals is to succeed as an IP core rather than standalone chip. For example I recall that recent nVidia GPUs already have RISC-V cores integrated in management role.
- microcolonel 9y agoApparently Qualcomm is also using RISC-V in roughly the same role. These embedded controllers are the perfect place to start with it, to be sure.
- fish_fan 9y agoI believe one major goal is avoiding active patents.
- Dowwie 9y agoNotice how they're selling through GroupGets? Aside from GroupGets and MassDrop, who else is operating in the crowd-funded, discounted bulk-purchase collaborative.. consumption.. space?
- reportingsjr 9y agoCrowdsupply, who are selling the HiFive1 mentioned in the article.
- ageofwant 9y agoUS$45 to ship down under for a US$50 order seems, excessive... guess I'll be buying the AU$10, shipping included one-hung-lo gearbest knockoff in a few months time then. Pity really, I love supporting these kind of projects.
- voltagex_ 9y agoCheck what PriceUSA or Shipito would charge. (not affiliated, have used both of these services before)
- Joking_Phantom 9y agoIMO, the first step for people interested in promoting RISC V should be to get it into the hands of the universities' undergrads. Berkeley's EECS 151 lab final semester project was to implement a RISC V CPU at 50 MHz on a FPGA. If EE/CS departments of colleges adopt RISC V hardware for teaching their students, providing cheap microcontrollers and boards to students at the start of their semester classes, those precocious little buggers are going to build Doom clones and help port their favorite flavor of linux onto them. When you've got a generation of top talent tinkering with an ISA that doesn't suck like x86, you're going to see adoption in actual industry.
- noir_lord 9y agoAmen, Unix spread that way.
- pjmlp 9y agoBringing the joy of C unsafety related exploits to all OSes.
- noir_lord 9y agoIn fairness the landscape was very different back then.
- zero_one_one 9y ago:set sarcasm Hey, That's unfair to C! If an OS is reckless enough to give a process memory when it asks for it, it should have no business worrying about what the process does with the allocation! In all seriousness though, the language can't be held responsible for poor programming practices. For any insecurities resulting from c code, blame the compiler! :)
- jagger27 9y agoI'm going to poke a few professors at Carleton to see if we can get an order of these.
- QML 9y ago
- phkahler 9y agoJust saw this: http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/SEGGER-Adds-Support-for-SiFive-s-Coreplex-IP-to-Its-Industry-Leading-J-Link-Debug-Probe-1002381278 http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/SEGGER-Adds-S... The ecosystem is starting to pull industry players.
- spilk 9y agoSlightly off topic, but are there more-or-less boilerplate RISC-V verilog/VHDL designs available that can deploy to ~$100ish FPGA boards? I'd be super interested in messing with that if so. I took digital design and HDL related courses in university but haven't really had an opportunity to do anything productive with that yet.
- peller 9y agoI have no experience with any of this, but to my knowledge what you're looking for is the Rocket Chip.[0] It's a RISC-V core implemented in Chisel. The primary FPGA target is a bit steep at around $500 [1] but there's a "small" config[2] that targets a more reasonable $190 board [3]. [0] https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip [1] http://store.digilentinc.com/zedboard-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-development-board/ http://store.digilentinc.com/zedboard-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc... [2] https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip#-how-can-i-parameterize-my-rocket-chip https://github.com/freechipsproject/rocket-chip#-how-can-i-p... [3] http://store.digilentinc.com/zybo-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-trainer-board/ http://store.digilentinc.com/zybo-zynq-7000-arm-fpga-soc-tra...
- zokier 9y agoQuickly googling I found two (edit: three) RISC-V cores that can target ice40, which is small/cheap fpga. It's of special interest because it has foss toolchain available
- jsolson 9y agoOpenCores probably has something. I don't know about RISC-V, specifically. On a semi-related note, I was surprised at how little area the ARM Design Start Cortex-M0 took up out of an Artix 35T. FPGAs have gotten big and simple CPUs are tiny :)
- TomV1971 9y agoYou can run a PicoRV32 on a dirt cheap Altera EP2C5 Cyclone 2 board. I have the RioRand® EP2C5T144 Altera Cyclone II FPGA Mini Development Board ($23 on Amazon). You'll also need a clone of a USB blaster JTAG cable, which goes for $10 or less.
- unwind 9y agoI think this is very interesting, and certainly consider myself a "fan" of the RISC-V ISA and project. Great to see cheaper/smaller boards coming along. I'm still hoping they can somehow get access to a flash process, so that they can integrate the CPU core (and peripherals, of course) with the flash in the same chip. This board still uses QSPI to talk to an external flash, which houses the code. I'm not sure how programming is done, with "traditional" microcontrollers that have their own flash, you use JTAG (or even serial on the older ones) to program the flash directly, then just remove the JTAG lines and reset the board and it runs your code. With this, I guess you have to program the SPI flash directly, or (perhaps?) use JTAG to talk to the microcontroller core and control its SPI that way? Anyway, my understanding is that flash memory is "deep analog magic" which the people behind RISC-V haven't mastered yet, so they can't design the memory into the same chip as the processor core.
- baobrien 9y agoDoes anybody know if/where you can just buy the FE310 on it's own?
- lndmrk 9y agohttps://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1/updates/fe310-chips-and-improved-documentation-are-now-available https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1/updates/fe310-chi...
- baobrien 9y agoThanks! I missed that. $5 per chip is really not bad for a higher end microcontroller, especially with the 'low volume' tax.