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RISC-V’s Open-Source Architecture Shakes Up Chip Design
- duskwuff 8y agoIt's a little early to say that RISC-V has shaken anything up. There are very few RISC-V parts available, and they are a long way away from being viable replacements for other commercially available processors.
- nickik 8y agoNot really, if you are making a SoC or IoT and you need some core there are RISC-V core that are competitive to many ARM cores. Look at the product lines of Andes, SiFive, Greenwave and others.
- duskwuff 8y agoI can't speak to the other two, but SiFive's offering -- the FE310 -- is a toy. 16K of on-chip RAM and no support for external memory is incredibly limiting -- and the part doesn't appear to be available through commercial distributors, making it unusable outside the hobbyist market.
- nickik 8y agoSiFive offers many chips other then the FE310 as well. Its a new company that has to bootstrap, Andes and others are existing companies that added lines of RISC-V processors.
- lsllc 8y agoI'm very interested in RISC-V. But show me the hardware! I'll buy one (as long as it's not prohibitively expensive). I'm looking at FPGAs also, but they are not really very compelling unless you want to spend ~$3K. So QEMU for now I guess.
- agalunar 8y agoTry taking a look at some of SiFive’s stuff. There’s the HiFive board ($59) or an FPGA bitstream that runs on an Artix-7 ($99).
- duskwuff 8y agoA warning from experience: The peripherals on the FE310 are poorly designed, and the documentation is even worse. Don't go into this expecting a convenient part to use. :/
- patrickg_zill 8y agoYou can get simpler FPGAs on a board that you can easily connect to for under $100. e.g. Numato Mimas w/Spartan 6 core https://numato.com/product/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-development-board-with-ddr-sdram https://numato.com/product/mimas-v2-spartan-6-fpga-developme... (with this plus the CPU softcore at j-core.org you can run Linux) Adafruit $79.95 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1553 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1553 (Spartan6) and $99.95 https://www.adafruit.com/product/451 https://www.adafruit.com/product/451 (Altera Cyclone IV) Many others on eBay etc. But this Reddit thread is likely useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/8kwz3q/fpga_boards_for_beginners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FPGA/comments/8kwz3q/fpga_boards_fo...
- lsllc 8y agoThanks for the info -- but are these capable of running Linux on RISC-V in an FPGA, not just a bare-metal RISC-V?
- gnufx 8y agoDoes anyone know the state of Shakti, which once had an ETA of 2018 for "manufacturing"? I couldn't find useful information when I last looked.
- ncmncm 8y agoUntil it gets popcount and count leading zeros, I can't use it.
- unixhero 8y agoUse it for what?