I look forward to a RISC-V proc powering my laptop with some ridiculous Nvidia GPU. We must escape x86 :(
Atm, arm is likely a better fit for that.
Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
11–20 of 157 posts
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#12I look forward to a RISC-V proc powering my laptop with some ridiculous Nvidia GPU. We must escape x86 :(
Atm, arm is likely a better fit for that.
Right now the arm SBCs actually make functional desktops. There's very little you can't do on a raspberry pi other than run closed software.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#13I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've l…
I see that what they recommend for the freedom platform
https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/
today, is a dev board
https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/
that costs around 3500 USD:
https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k...
Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Atm, arm is likely a better fit for that.
Right now the arm SBCs actually make functional desktops. There's very little you can't do on a raspberry pi other than run closed software.
You can actually run Windows on a Raspberry Pi. Having said that, they make for horrible machines to do actual work on even with desktop Linux.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#15I look forward to a RISC-V proc powering my laptop with some ridiculous Nvidia GPU. We must escape x86 :(
Twice the battery life and all the computing power :) sounds like heaven
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#16I look forward to a RISC-V proc powering my laptop with some ridiculous Nvidia GPU. We must escape x86 :(
Atm, arm is likely a better fit for that.
I wish ARM made all their manufactures use UEFI. Microsoft did for their phones, but the bootloaders are locked. All the other ARM devices are SoCs with random shit connected to random pins and non-upstreamable kernels. It's not a platform.
For a new design to work, it really need to be a sold platform, with a spec and kernels that don't need per-device images to boot and run. Device trees help, but they're just not enough.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now the arm SBCs actually make functional desktops. There's very little you can't do on a raspberry pi other than run closed software.
You can actually run Windows on a Raspberry Pi. Having said that, they make for horrible machines to do actual work on even with desktop Linux.
Vim and gcc run fine, I can compiler kernels and busybox and work on my personal software projects and homework on mine. They don't run gnome or html5 browsers as well as your laptop might but nothing runs those well anyway.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Atm, arm is likely a better fit for that.
I wish ARM made all their manufactures use UEFI. Microsoft did for their phones, but the bootloaders are locked. All the other ARM devices are SoCs with random shit connected to random pins and non-upstreamable kernels. It's not a platform. For a new design to work, it really need to be a sold platform, with a spec and kernels that don't need per-device images to boot and run. Device trees help, but they're just not…
ARM has the beginnings of that platform coming together, just in the server space. It's pretty much implementable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#19[deleted]
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've l…
I see that what they recommend for the freedom platform https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ today, is a dev board https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ that costs around 3500 USD: https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k... Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar…
A somewhat speed-optimized IP CPU core [1] runs at 600DMIPs on a Virtex7. I would hope that SiFive is in the same ballpark, but it's probably slower.
Even in a best-case scenario, this is nowhere near a low end consumer PC.
edit: For reference, my 5 years old Thinkpad x230 does around 7400 DMIPs per core.
[1] - https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html