4 ms·

I would be happy if all my bullet points applied only to cycle accurate sims. I think the market would create itself with the right ingredients present. I thi

I would be happy if all my bullet points applied only to cycle accurate sims. I think the market would create itself with the right ingredients present. I think a high level language, a well defined intermediate representation with an eye toward synthesis but initially just targeting simulation, and a cycle accurate high performance simulator for said intermediate language would be explosive. (bonus points for writing the sim in WASM, heh)

dbcurtis 9y ago
WASM? Well, if I'm going to tilt at windmills, I'll use the project to learn Rust while I'm at it. Explosive? I remain unconvinced. There just aren't enough people doing that kind of work. I am excited to see progress in open source FPGA fitters. I've always felt those would be hard to do because without access to the performance model, it is hard to do a good job of auto-placement. So that is cool, even though the current open source tool (I forget the name...) only does a few FPGAs.
- exikyut 9y ago
  If an open source tool exists, people will end up playing with it. That's categorically not the same of closed source tools - as social creatures we want to share what we're doing, so if we can't share that we stumbled on a cool closed-source tool leaked on the internet, what's the point of playing with it? So there's that. I would very much like to hear about your progress on this, FWIW. Also, I'm not sure, but just in case the following things I was reminded of are directly/indirectly useful/helpful (for ideas or parts, or maybe some of the engineers may be interesting to talk to..?)... - MARSSx86 - a cycle-accurate x86 emulator built on top of QEMU: http://www.marss86.org/~marss86/index.php/Home http://www.marss86.org/~marss86/index.php/Home - Cling - a C++ interpreter built on top of LLVM's JIT: https://root.cern.ch/cling https://root.cern.ch/cling There are several cycle-accurate emulators out there, MARSSx86 is the first I discovered. I'm not sure if it's useful. I'm not entirely sure why I'm mentioning Cling. It used to be based on a custom runtime (and called CINT) that was absolutely massive and was basically its own C++ implementation. Cling is effectively a very small patch/driver on top of LLVM's C++ implementation and its JIT runtime.
pedroaraujo 9y ago
Why do you think an high level language would be a positive thing? The ones that are currently available generate worse designs than hand written Verilog. Verilog is still used for a very good reason, it is not because the EDA industry is stuck in time.

dbcurtis 9y ago

WASM? Well, if I'm going to tilt at windmills, I'll use the project to learn Rust while I'm at it. Explosive? I remain unconvinced. There just aren't enough people doing that kind of work. I am excited to see progress in open source FPGA fitters. I've always felt those would be hard to do because without access to the performance model, it is hard to do a good job of auto-placement. So that is cool, even though the current open source tool (I forget the name...) only does a few FPGAs.

exikyut 9y ago
If an open source tool exists, people will end up playing with it. That's categorically not the same of closed source tools - as social creatures we want to share what we're doing, so if we can't share that we stumbled on a cool closed-source tool leaked on the internet, what's the point of playing with it? So there's that. I would very much like to hear about your progress on this, FWIW. Also, I'm not sure, but just in case the following things I was reminded of are directly/indirectly useful/helpful (for ideas or parts, or maybe some of the engineers may be interesting to talk to..?)... - MARSSx86 - a cycle-accurate x86 emulator built on top of QEMU: http://www.marss86.org/~marss86/index.php/Home http://www.marss86.org/~marss86/index.php/Home - Cling - a C++ interpreter built on top of LLVM's JIT: https://root.cern.ch/cling https://root.cern.ch/cling There are several cycle-accurate emulators out there, MARSSx86 is the first I discovered. I'm not sure if it's useful. I'm not entirely sure why I'm mentioning Cling. It used to be based on a custom runtime (and called CINT) that was absolutely massive and was basically its own C++ implementation. Cling is effectively a very small patch/driver on top of LLVM's C++ implementation and its JIT runtime.

pedroaraujo 9y ago

Why do you think an high level language would be a positive thing? The ones that are currently available generate worse designs than hand written Verilog. Verilog is still used for a very good reason, it is not because the EDA industry is stuck in time.