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Having a relatively sophisticated core you can take off the shelf and modify for your own research can be incredibly useful in academia, I would have really lik
by Symmetry 5y ago
Having a relatively sophisticated core you can take off the shelf and modify for your own research can be incredibly useful in academia, I would have really liked that when I was doing my thesis. For large companies too who might want particular new instructions or sets of features that are best suited to their own use cases.
- jlokier 5y agoSPARC has been open source since 2005, complete with high quality implementation released in 2006. 64-bit, 8 cores, 32 hyperthreads, rising to 64 by 2007. Simulator also provided. SPARC was able to run Linux and Solaris, and used by Sun in their servers that powered much of the commercial internet in late 90s and early 2000s (before x86 Linux took over). There have been a few others since then. So relatively sophisticated open source cores for study and modification have been around for many years by now. It looks to me like the difference with RISC-V is that a larger community has formed around it due to smart organisation and the timing being right, rather than availability.