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That was an interesting read. How do the resulting CPUs compare against their equivalents from other vendors? I know that most FPGA vendors also supply their ow
by nrclark 3y ago
That was an interesting read. How do the resulting CPUs compare against their equivalents from other vendors? I know that most FPGA vendors also supply their own soft-core 8- and 32-bit CPUs.
One of the things I always think about this projects like this is "what does the maintenance look like"? Writing a custom CPU is one thing. But maintaining a custom compiler for it is a whole other ball of wax. I'd take the hit on code-density if it meant that I could use an off-the-shelf GCC.
Custom compilers (or even custom backends) are a hotspot for expensive-to-discover bugs. It's also a non-trivial maintenance burden.
- Someone 3y agoOn the plus side, not being pipelined or out of order makes for a simpler compiler. If they also picked a sane instruction set that’s suitable for compilers (e.g. not something like a 6502), it may not be too hard to maintain a decent compiler backend.