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XiangShan open-source 64-bit RISC-V processor to rival Arm Cortex-A76
- goodpoint 5y ago"""The RISC-V core has been developed with Chisel language ... released under a Mulan PSL v2 license"""
- the-dude 5y agohttps://opensource.org/licenses/MulanPSL-2.0 https://opensource.org/licenses/MulanPSL-2.0 Which apparently grants a patent license.
- alexmcc81 5y agoMore info: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mulanpsl-2.0/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mulanpsl-2.0/
- amelius 5y agoOnly for the patents owned by the contributors.
- hvis 5y agoSounds similar to Apache 2.0 License.
- jarrell_mark 5y agoIt's the first OSI approved open source license written in two languages
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tyingq 5y agoMicroMagic is pretty interesting to me in the RISC-V space: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/new-risc-v-cpu-claims-recordbreaking-performance-per-watt/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/new-risc-v-cpu-claim... They are getting perf-per-watt numbers that are ahead of everyone...albeit with a single core and no real 3rd party verification. Some of the group had worked on Sparc at Sun, and they had previously sold themselves to Juniper for $260M, then regrouped some time afterwards.
- MobiusHorizons 5y agoThe previous discussion of that article on HN seemed to point to those numbers being totally unsuported. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25262834 Obviously I would love those perf-per-watt numbers to be correct, but it doesn't seem like they have shown it yet.
- mnurzia 5y agoIt's worth noting that Micro Magic's design tools are likely what allowed them to claim these numbers. Some of the claims they make about their software are pretty impressive, but it mainly boils down to intelligent placing/routing techniques that mirror fully custom hand-made silicon designs but are actually designed by the computer: http://www.micromagic.com/datasheets/PDFs/DPC_3page_Layout.pdf http://www.micromagic.com/datasheets/PDFs/DPC_3page_Layout.p... It seems like their design workflow is ahead of the rest of the field.
- shdh 5y agoAI models are also conducting placement of components now.
- throwaway4good 5y agoImpressive work by an university group. Perhaps also a testament to what you get in terms of productivity, if you use a more modern platform / language (Chisel/Scala).
- xwolfi 5y agoIt's not yet in computers, let's see if they dont face real world struggle in actual industrialization for the mass market first (or if they even manage to reach this point). Productivity goes from design to client satisfaction :) A very productive team is not a team who prints an open source document nobody can use !
- rowanG077 5y agoThis is a university project. It will never be in "real" computers. At least not as a result of the doing of the university. Someone else could take this design and put it into "real" computers.
- eunos 5y agoI don't know whether it is possible with chip development or not. But I really hope that this project will enable numerous amount of derivative chips just as Linux kernel allows multiple distro. That means IoT/GPU/CPU/etc chips need not to start from scratch. In addition, having similar foundations might help fabs manufacture those chips swiftly.
- goodpoint 5y agoThat's the whole point of open source hardware. Unfortunately most of the licenses used are not reciprocal and this does not encourage building ecosystems.
- yorwba 5y agoIn the readme, they list three components that were sourced from other open-source projects: https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan/blob/master/README.md#acknowledgement https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan/blob/master/READM... So it seems like there already is a little bit of an ecosystem.
- ekiwi 5y agoI think the hardest problem is contributing changes back upstream. With hardware, people are a lot more paranoid about introducing new bugs and I feel like that sometimes makes collaboration a lot more difficult.
- yorwba 5y agoIn a writeup on WeChat https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MAkxKZ1eS4UwBkvgD91Xng https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MAkxKZ1eS4UwBkvgD91Xng , Prof. Bao Yungang mentioned that one reason for starting the project was that they felt the barrier of contributing to Berkeley's BOOM https://boom-core.org/ https://boom-core.org/ was too high, pointing out that only 8 people contributed more than 100 lines. So at least they're aware of the problem, although that doesn't guarantee that they'll fare better in terms of attracting outside contributions.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoVery cool to see a team of 25 students put this together and get prototypes made. I wish opportunities like these were available back in my college days. The headline is getting slightly ahead of the actual performance. Reaching Cortex-A76 performance is their goal after many more iterations. Their current implementation is not there yet, but that shouldn't detract from the magnitude of their achievement and their contribution to the open-source world: > This culminated with an 8-core prototype built based on Yanqihu (雁栖湖) architecture using TSMC’s 28nm process with the processor running up to 1.2 or 1.3 GHz that should be taped out this month. But plans have been made to tape out a new prototype based on Nanhu (南湖) by the end of the year, using SMIC’s 14nm process allowing up to 2 GHz frequency, and further iterations of the architecture will aim at rivaling Arm’s Cortex-A76 processor. RISC-V is an exciting development in the SoC world. We're starting to see some of HiFive's boards trickle out into the wild. The performance is good, but it's not quite as groundbreaking as many of the headlines make it out to be. The most exciting part of all of this is that ARM has more competition and we get to see some open-source contributions like this.
- ethbr0 5y agoAre there higher level abstraction efforts in the linux kernel to prevent a hypothetical custom RISC-V diversity explosion from ending up quite as messily as custom ARM did? Afaict, most of the ARM ugliness was around non-"CPU" SoC components. But it definitely seemed like kernel code organization wasn't ready for a 10x (or 100x) explosion of popular SoCs. And the entire point of open sourced RISC-V cores is that they would enable even more chip diversity, no?
- voakbasda 5y agoThere have been discussions about this, and my conclusion is that there definitely could be a problem on the order of ARM’s. With luck, RISC-V will learn from history and not doom itself to repeat the same mistakes.
- Pet_Ant 5y agoIs there an existing standard that board implementations can rally around? Something like OpenBoot? Make it a defacto standard.
- jhvkjhk 5y agoFor those who don't know, Xiang Shan is a famous hill in Beijing, best known for red leaves in autumn.
- clubdorothe 5y agoIn Taipei (Taiwan), it is the name of a mountain where most of the photos shots are taken. It's a great small hike you should do if you visit the city. Start the hike around 4.30pm to catch the sunset. https://taiwangoldcard.com/images/taiwan-unsplash.jpeg https://taiwangoldcard.com/images/taiwan-unsplash.jpeg
- gibolt 5y agoIt is written 象山, which means elephant mountain. There are elephant statues on the hike.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoThe one in Beijing is 香山, Fragrant Hill. This project is the same.
- contingencies 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragrant_Hills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragrant_Hills
- zadokshi 5y agoYes but the Chinese characters make it clear that it’s not a reference to Taiwan. That mountain trail in Taiwan is breathtakingly awesome though.
- magicsmoke 5y agoThe confusion over Chinese names and logograms is pretty funny considering that in Chinese, western names are written with a set of phonetic logograms and losing that spelling information with latin/cyrillic characters makes it hard to tell if the name was English, Italian, German, or Russian. Personally, it would be great if names on western websites are written with logograms in parenthesis and names on Chinese websites are written with spelled characters in parenthesis. Just another one of those weird cross-cultural areas of friction.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoThis is really cool. I hope this leads to more innovation in the open source phones, computers, and game hardware.
- gswdh 5y agoI don’t worry about AÍ taking our jobs, I worry about Asia becoming the dominant force in silicon design and manufacturing. Imagine trying to decipher a translated Chinese data sheet...