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Congrats on your achievement. I have seen many, many softcores run on FPGA (usually from a beginner to HDL and unoptimized as a result) however I have never see

Congrats on your achievement. I have seen many, many softcores run on FPGA (usually from a beginner to HDL and unoptimized as a result) however I have never seen a softcore impl this performant, enough to run quake at 40fps. For logic usage I see you have about 12k LEs on a Max10 running up to 100mhz with FPU. This is really good. I have looked at many, including NiosII/f. What chip are you running for the demo? It looks like a DE1 but I can't quite tell. I would be curious to see how your Fmax increases when moving to a slightly more modern chip like the Cyclone V (from 60nm to 28)

mbitsnbites 3y ago
So the demo is actually running on a DE0-CV, with a Cyclone V. A key thing for running Quake at acceptable speeds is to have a proper FPU, and most hobby softcores tend to exclude those. I actually expect the CPU to run even faster (same clock, but fewer stalls), once I get around to improving a few things. I am seeing roughly 2 CPI in Quake right now, and I hope that there is potential to get closer to 1 CPI. BTW, I fake-it-til-I-make-it with timing. I usually blow the timing budget when I go above 70 MHz, but I just run it 100+ MHz anyway (i.e. I'm effectively "overclocking"). As you may tell I'm a beginner myself (this is my first proper FPGA project, except for a master thesis project a couple of decades ago).