Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

Post by Karrot_Kream » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:27 AM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #122

detuur wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't be any more dead-on. EDA feels like Scientology, where with every level closer to the core you first need to invest half your life savings + a firstborn. I have an FPGA lying on my desk I can do barely anything interesting with because there are no open-source cores for even simple things like USB3.1 controllers or Thunderbolt or pretty much any interesting bus. Protocols are strongly guarded open secret…

USB 3.1 pushes data at 10Gbps. Do you have any idea how much black magic it takes to do that? Try writing an FPGA SDRAM controller that reliably operates across frequency, voltage, and temperature at 150 MHz. It is doable but a challenge with the common xilinx boards that are sold to hobbyists for $80. If you can do that, then think about designing a circuit which operates 20 times faster, and negotiates a protocol w…

Post by esmi » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

ur-whale wrote: post #185

tasty_freeze wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USB 3.1 pushes data at 10Gbps. Do you have any idea how much black magic it takes to do that? Try writing an FPGA SDRAM controller that reliably operates across frequency, voltage, and temperature at 150 MHz. It is doable but a challenge with the common xilinx boards that are sold to hobbyists for $80. If you can do that, then think about designing a circuit which operates 20 times faster, and negotiates a protocol w…

I have no doubt that solving modern state-of-the-art protocol is an extremely complex endeavor. All the more reason for sharing your solutions with the rest of the world, or at the very least parts of it. The problem with the EDA industry is their firmly held belief that these kind of trade secrets is what they're competing with. Think of Google, who had this exact same struggle internally. For BigTable and MapReduce…

Post by absurdmind » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

Post by acqq » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #135

drblast wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit, around 2005/6 I took an EE class in programmable logic that used ABEL for the labs. I couldn't find any information on it anywhere and all we had to learn the language was an old single-page photocopy of an example that had been re-copied so many times it was barely readable. And the ends of the lines were cut off. Needless to say, the ABEL projects were frustrating...indeed a shame that it's not open sour…

I have an original manual around here somewhere, I wonder if anyone would shoot me if I scanned it and made it available :-/ Some more info (I'm surprised at the response here!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Boolean_Expression_La... "The ABEL concept and original compiler were created by Russell de Pina of Data I/O's Applied Research Group in 1981." This is false. I don't know what de Pina did, but ABEL was…

Post by B1FF_PSUVM » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 10:25 AM UTC

esmi wrote: post #213

ur-whale wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that solving modern state-of-the-art protocol is an extremely complex endeavor. All the more reason for sharing your solutions with the rest of the world, or at the very least parts of it. The problem with the EDA industry is their firmly held belief that these kind of trade secrets is what they're competing with. Think of Google, who had this exact same struggle internally. For BigTable and MapReduce…

Google has that luxury because they make their money on ads. If their primary source of revenue was selling a database product (like say oracle) then there may have been a different decision made there.