zhemao

27 ms·

241.
by zhemao 11y ago
We already have a RISC-V superscalar out-of-order core, the Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine (BOOM). https://github.com/ucb-bar/riscv-boom
242.
by zhemao 11y ago
Yes, definitely. Berkeley's open-source Rocket[1] core can already be programmed onto the Zedboard and ZC706[2], which also use Zynq 7000 series FPGAs. Getting it to work on the Parallela should just be a matter of changing the clock c
243.
by zhemao 11y ago
I think it's worth noting that perceptions of these "world conquerors" depend a lot on whether you live in one of the countries that were conquered or the country that did the conquering. Perceptions of Genghis Khan are much
244.
by zhemao 11y ago
Wow, this is really great. There really is a wealth of knowledge and culture here. I'm especially interested in the collection of sheet music. It would be really great to make an album with new recordings of the old songs.
245.
by zhemao 11y ago
BOOM also has virtual memory support. But yes, if you have a Zedboard, you can run the reference RTL yourself. Of course, those things are pretty costly, so I understand if you'd like to see someone else do it.
246.
by zhemao 11y ago
Um, it depends on what exactly you mean by "reference implementation" or "running". If you mean one of the silicon test chips, that might be hard to swing. I don't have them at my desk and they take a lot of setup t
247.
by zhemao 11y ago
There has been one tape-out of Z-scale. An early iteration of it was used as a power management controller in one of our DVFS test chips. But we've made many changes since then and haven't taped it out since.
248.
by zhemao 11y ago
We have taped out several chips for our own research. But as a university research lab, we do not have any plans for a commercial manufacturing run. The lowRISC team can say more about the roadmap to a commercial dev board.
249.
by zhemao 11y ago
The RISC-V ISA and Berkeley's open source reference implementations are BSD-licensed, not LGPL. And yes, the RISC-V ISA is simpler than the SPARC ISA. We also have clearly separated the base integer ISA from the various extensions, suc
250.
by zhemao 11y ago
> OpenRISC, OpenSPARC Can't really comment, since these aren't our projects. I haven't really seen any developments on these fronts, though. > RISC-V, Z-Scale, BOOM RISC-V is the ISA. Rocket, Z-Scale, and BOOM are imple
251.
by zhemao 11y ago
> a modern x86 decoder is smaller than a modern arm decoder That's because the ARM ISA is not small either by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, the instruction listing of the base RISC-V ISA and the standard extensi
252.
by zhemao 11y ago
We do expect embedded systems to be the main use of RISC-V processors at the outset. In fact, I believe there is a consumer product out now - some kind of camera - which uses a RISC-V processor. I don't think we'll be able to comp
253.
by zhemao 11y ago
Hi, I'm a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley on the RISC-V team. Happy to answer any questions about the RISC-V ISA or Rocket, our open-source reference implementation. Since there's always confusion about it, I'll start off by cla
254.
by zhemao 11y ago
I'm sure it won't be long before this is used for something more intense than hugging.
255.
by zhemao 11y ago
Wait, are you saying that China hasn't experienced terrorism? That's definitely untrue. Terrorist attacks by Uyghur separatist groups is not an infrequent occurence. There was a highly publicized attack in Kunming in 2014.
256.
by zhemao 11y ago
It's not about stroke order. You just forget how it should look. It's like the difference between being able to recognize someone's face and being able to draw it from memory.
257.
by zhemao 11y ago
Of course some cultural values are better than others. Some cultures are highly sexist/racist/xenophobic/homophobic. Would you say these values are no better or worse than any other?
258.
by zhemao 11y ago
I don't think Facebook is different from any other publicly traded company in that regard. No publicly traded for-profit company is going to pay more taxes than it is legally obligated to. Also, Facebook's taxes are not the same a
259.
by zhemao 11y ago
Eh, while it's true that most Chinese students who study abroad have wealthy parents, I think the article vastly overstates the prevalence of the "You+ attitude". I think the majority of Chinese would still like to own nice t
260.
by zhemao 11y ago
Joof means the classical American dream, which involves owning a house in the suburbs with a spacious well-groomed lawn and white picket fence. And of course a car, because absolutely nothing is in walking distance anymore. I agree this is
261.
by zhemao 11y ago
Wow, as both an electrical engineer and avid amateur musician, this is pretty fascinating. The first place winner from last year is pretty cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRxr3ZWVjM4 It appears to be a very sophistica
262.
by zhemao 11y ago
Well that was kind of horrifying.
263.
by zhemao 11y ago
> replacing dozens of workers who scrub Levi’s blue jeans with sandpaper to give them the worn look that American consumers find stylish This really made me laugh. Levi paying Chinese workers to quite labor-intensively lower the quality
264.
by zhemao 11y ago
Yeah, exactly. A lot of research done on DARPA grants is only tangentially related to military applications. For instance, our lab gets half our funding from DARPA and we work on general-purpose CPUs and vector accelerators. You can't
265.
by zhemao 11y ago
Africa and India don't have widely available contraception, high levels of education, and low rates of infant mortality. Solve those problems and people will have fewer kids.
266.
by zhemao 11y ago
Yeah, I wonder if there's been any studies done on the validity of "Little Emperor" syndrome. That is, the fear that the generation of single children would grow up spoiled and socially maladjusted.
267.
by zhemao 11y ago
Singapore started the Stop at Two campaign in the 1970s. China's one-child policy was instituted in 1981. Granted, the effects of Singapore's program wouldn't have been clear at that point, but there was already a precedent f
268.
by zhemao 11y ago
Okay, fair enough. What you describe are essentially extended instructions, and RISC-V has support for it. One of our teams is currently working on a vector co-processor that can get very good performance on compute-heavy workloads.
269.
by zhemao 11y ago
> I don't know what the rural attitudes are, since I haven't talked with people in the countryside Rural families have largely been exempted from the one-child policy for a while now. This new development won't change any
270.
by zhemao 11y ago
The absurdly high birth rates of the 1960s were due in no small part to government policy. The communist leadership under Mao Zedong encouraged people to have lots of children, believing that a large population would power economic growth.

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